You hit the nail on the head, @Lindagaf.
I heard Jeff in a lengthy interview recently. He believes that college admissions has become a game, run by the colleges, in which they hold all the cards. In the end, the colleges pick who will be admitted.
He is advising parents to stop playing the game. It’s a game you can’t win because it’s rigged. Instead of letting the colleges be the ones who choose who gets in, he says, you be the chooser. You can’t get into those elite schools anyway, he says, so he proposes this list as a group of very good schools that you can actually get into, a group from which you will do the choosing rather than the other way around. . . and have a good chance of getting a discount.
An important feature of this list is that it is national. He says that most kids go to schools more or less close to home, so a list for everyone should include at least some schools which are within reach geographically of anyone in the country regardless of where you live.