I agree with you, but with the low acceptance rates at top colleges, you have to have an affordable back-up plan.
It's true that admission to top-tier schools is difficult. Stanford, I think, had an overall admissions rate of 5.1%. That may have been just about the lowest in the country of the top schools. Harvard's regular decision (factoring out the early action kids) was a record-low 3.1%. University of Chicago is now sub-10%. But there are still a number of top-tier, or near top-tier schools with admissions rates of 15% - 25%, or even higher. Duke admits 14%. Notre Dame admits 23%. Boston College admits 29%. Boston University is at 49%. In the USNWR ratings, Duke's top-10, Notre Dame is top-20, and BU is top-50.
So, for top kids, there's a wide range of really good schools that give pretty good to great financial aid that, if you apply to more than one or two (or three or five), you should get in somewhere.
Each student's needs and desires are different, but neither of my sons applied to any of the schools around the country that sent them unsolicited offers of full scholarships. With the exception of our state flagship, they pretty much only selected schools from around the top 50 in the US.
For both my sons (the younger one is on the cusp of finishing the process as he is a high school senior this year), that was the "backup" plan - state flagship + a wide selection of top schools.
Both were admitted to our state flagship with substantial scholarship offers. Both were admitted to multiple other top-50 schools with offers of aid ranging from affordable to very affordable.
Interestingly, there seems to be an incipient move away from loans in the top schools, at least to some degree. Several of the schools that accepted my younger son came back with no-loan financial aid packages. The use of loans in my older son's financial aid package from Hopkins was probably the deal-breaker for us. That was two years ago. My younger son's offer this month came with a scholarship specifically designated to replace the normal Hopkins loan package of about $20K. The scholarship program is funded by ex-NY mayor Michael Bloomberg (JHU, '64).
We're all chucking that Mike Bloomberg’s money may help to send a right-wing crazy conservative pro-life, pro-traditional marriage, anti-statist Catholic kid to college.
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