I think the original idea for the thread is interesting, so to try to move fully back to it, here’s the view I get from talking with students and other parents in Alaska:
Top tier: University of Washington
Top tier, among the few who are considering hypercompetitive colleges: Stanford
Top tier, among the ever fewer who prefer LACs: Reed
Next tier: Oregon, Oregon State, Arizona State, USC, MIT and Harvey Mudd and Caltech for the engineering- and CS-minded
The Ivies (and, to a lesser extent, Rice and maybe Vanderbilt) are probably somewhere around this slot, or even higher, but they don’t actually enter into the conversation much at all, really. Some of the women’s colleges—Smith, Mt Holyoke, Mills—probably fit here, too, though that’s only a very small slice of the population looking at them, as well.
Next tier: Western Washington, Hawai’i, maybe Pacific Lutheran (there’s a decent alum presence here, despite its small size), maybe the big Texas publics, Minnesota, Idaho, Idaho State, maybe Montana State
All that said, though, our local open-access colleges (which is effectively all we have in state—our three publics and one private show up as non- or minimally competitive in all the college guides) have phenomenal yield rates—basically, most Alaskans, if they’re going to college, are going to one of those despite their lack of prestigiosity, even locally.