I wouldn’t say top 20 college per say but top 20 within their major(which many times coincides with top 20) as well as fit.
My S19, a pretty lazy student with 99 percentile PSAT score, gets a kick out of sarcastically reading the first line of all these letters extolling his special “passion for learning.” He can’t even figure out what classes he wants to take junior year, much less think about college.
I think some schools must target students with specific stats while others seem to just send mailers out to any test taker with a pulse. That’s the only way I could explain my very average stats D16 getting mailings from U Chicago. S19 is getting more mailings that his sister did and from better schools (fancy mailing from Macalester today). This is a kid who is basically likely to want to go where ever his friends are going, so probably a Virginia public.
Funny, of the thousands of pieces of mail that we got, she never got ONE PIECE from Yale. How ironic. We did post the solicitation letter she got from Harvard on my refrigerator for a few weeks just for fun since there was no way she was ever going to apply there. :))
@moscott - I have no clue. My D, who you can see from my avatar, is at Yale and was a legacy applicant. She had great scores on the PSAT and later the SAT. Those databases are brutal. Once they get a hold of you, you are done. She got information from what can be considered top tier schools. Over the course of the two years she got it, many were duplicates or different types of info from the same school.
It’s marketing. If they don’t solicit you, you won’t buy the product.
My daughter talked to a recruiter for the U of Wyoming at a college fair in Florida. We had a connection because my BIL is an alum so we stopped to talk, and no one else was waiting; the tables for UF, Alabama, Clemson, Auburn were 10 deep. He had nice brochures and probably pencils.
Guess where she goes? We hadn’t really considered it until that college fair.
Not just scores. For the psat, the kids can enter possible major. D1 mistakenly put in “Legal Studies” or some such, instead of (pre) law, and got mail from all sorts of dubious programs. Usually, postcards or foldover mailers, since these were small budget schools.
Then it got really funny. Some flight attendant “college,” hair academies, she still gets mail from trade techs, though she graduated from college 3 years ago.
(For a long while, I kept the stewardess one on the wall in her room.)
My son filled out a form on the University of Minnesota website because they offered a free bumper sticker or water bottle. He was not even that interested in the school, but had seen the campus once because his grandparents lived nearby. Well, afterwards, he kept getting all these phone calls from U of M student volunteers trying to convince him to apply! They were relentless! It became awkward.
D got mailings from most top 20 schools. It was laughable. Never in a million years would she have been accepted to Stanford or Harvard, but I had fun bragging about it on FB. But I am one of those insufferable parents that brags about my kids on FB all the time. 
There’s definitely more that just a score triggering all of the emails and snail mails. My S18 gets some emails, and occasionally some snail mail, nothing like the deluge that others on CC report. He did well on the PSAT freshman year, even better sophomore year, and knocked it out of the park this year (226). He’s already an AP Scholar also. I’m thinking our zip code may have something to do with the number of mailings 
He’ll be taking the ACT and SAT soon; it’ll be interesting to see what happens then
S19 got a mailer from Macalester yesterday as well, @eh1234. It had a picture of the earth, inside an orange peel. There was another mailer from Oberlin. It had a picture of the earth as well. S says, “So, this school is out of the orange?” Well, son, I’ve heard that Oberlin is out of the orange…
He doesn’t open or read these mailings, but they do make impressions, of a sort.
@appalachymom I wonder if you’re on to something with the zip code theory. My D18 has scored very well on PSAT, SAT, subject tests, ACT, and AP tests. She checks the box to receive mail, yet we don’t see all that much–maybe 4-5 mailers a week at most? She gets more email than that, up to perhaps 6-8 a day, but certainly not every day. We live in Oklahoma, in a somewhat rural zip code. By your screen name I’m guessing you are also in an area that traditionally does not send a lot of students to elite schools? You’d think high performers in such underrepresented areas would receive more attention, not less.