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Nonsense. I have neither the need nor desire to boost Duke. I applied to Duke but not Stanford precisely because of many of their differences, and I would be the last to emphasize similarities. It doesn’t bother me in the slightest which schools people compare Duke to or whether the OP applies there. As it happens, I think Duke’s limited engineering offerings (4 majors) and lack of a business program would make it a questionable choice, though perhaps not a wholly unreasonable one. </p>
<p>As for recommendations, I already made some but am happy to provide the OP with others. Lehigh, Penn State, UMD College Park, and Wisconsin come to mind among national universities. If the OP doesn’t mind small schools, Bucknell, Lafayette, and Union offer seasons, Greek life, engineering, and (mostly) DI athletics.</p>
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For the very best applicants, yes, I think increasingly it is mostly a reach/safety dichotomy. Finding matches - colleges with similar stats and decently high admit rates, like Chicago of a few years back or USC and Tufts today - is almost impossible these days. A school like Dartmouth admits about 8% of applicants in the RD round…not terribly good odds even if you do fit in the target/BWRK crowd (2250+, 4.00, good ecs, etc.). If you dislike my twisting of the term “reach,” perhaps you could instead say that Cornell and similar schools are highly selective matches for people like the OP; it makes no substantive difference. I agree that Michigan and probably CMU are good matches.</p>