“My son got into Cornell ED to study Econ and government.
I sometimes feel he could have aimed even higher.”
Oh, gag. What part of “Cornell is one of the best universities in the land” isn’t clear? There IS no higher.
This is like having your kid make the Olympics team and then being “sad” he didn’t win the gold. Still better than 99.99% of the population.
The very fact that you saw college admissions as “the best way to get him into an Ivy” says that you were under some mistaken impression that Ivies are more prestigious than other schools, or have some magic dust that other schools don’t. Maybe that’s what your friends in India think, but that’s not how the US works, at all. At the elite level at which your son got in, there just really aren’t major differences.