Background: Student attends large suburban high school in California. Favors large national schools with strong D1 sports.
Crossed off list: Dartmouth, (too rural), Cal Poly SLO (same) Columbia, NYU, BU, Chicago (not a fan of city campuses esp. where there is no real “campus”) Maryland (yuck), Idaho and WSU (to be fair these were never really in contention).
Liked campus but did not apply: American, Northwestern.
Applied and accepted at several Big 10 schools, still waiting to hear from UCs and a couple of highly selective top 20 reach schools.