For each of my kids, we have built their college list from the bottom up. I started taking them around to schools that they were almost sure to get into until they found their safe schools. Then we built up from their. It is always easy to find a few elite schools that they MAY get into that they love- so often they just fall for the name!!! So I found that it was best to save that for the end of the college search.
One was looking at high level top 20 schools and we started the list with much more likely schools given the GPA and Scores and worked our way up towards reaches. The other kid is interested in engineering and tech schools so we created a list of possible schools and get excited from the bottom of the list moving up. It’s much more fun to tour schools they have a chance of actually attending and less stressful to tour the reaches if they have a reasonable safety already on the list.