Yes! I’m sorry I did not convey this well.
What I was trying to say was for high stats kids, things like College Board’s college search shows almost all schools as either “safety” or “reach,” there are almost no schools that pop up as “match.“ And for those schools that do register as “match“ when we started looking into details on what the admissions office says they look for, as well as exploring on forums like this what background other people have who are applying or have been admitted, rigor pops up as a big deal for those schools and it seems like most kids have a minimum of five and, often, 8+ APs!
I absolutely agree with you that many of the schools that register as “safety“ would be a great place for my son (and most other students) to be. I was trying to communicate that ON PAPER one gets the impression that these students are… overqualified? I know that, in reality, that’s not the case, I was just discussing the challenge of figuring out which schools are actually a good academic fit for a kid with high GPA/SAT and only a few AP courses when you are just looking at the statistics that are published.