There are lots of schools that are great on paper for kids with 95th percentile stats, who also don’t have 5+ AP classes. They might just not be the schools that child or their parents envision. Those are two different things.
At all the no name/little name recognition schools we’ve ended up visiting - we’ve met professors who got their PhDs at UVA, UChicago, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Michigan, Cal Berkeley, UCLA, NYU, UIUC, and many many other “top” name schools. We’ve been shown the stories/stats of how well students do in terms of grad school placement and/or employment 6 months after graduation (every one of those above 91% - most above 95%). Many of these lesser known schools actually have better than average med school placement (above 50-60% in some of them) than better known schools.
We’ve met students who earned Fulbright scholarships, Boren awards, and who were invited to join Phi Beta Kappa as juniors.
There are really smart, capable students at every school, not just the ‘highly rejective’. And there are amazing professors who get really invested in their students success and learning at every school.
Amazing students aren’t only well served at the most selective/rejective colleges and universities. I wish that fallacy would just die already. It really leads to so much frustration and angst on the part of students and parents.