Agree with @intparent. In the case of my middle son (stats listed above), I knew he had a few overcoming stories and his cello performances to commend him, but I actually assumed he would not get into his reaches, so we were very, very surprised when he got into an Ivy as well as UCSD, Northeastern and U Rochester. But he was rejected by four top schools and waitlisted by three others. He had numerous safeties on his list.
Because I knew the scoop, we were well prepared, but in retrospect, there were still definite missteps. Because we are a high need family (he was a small Pell Grant recipient that year), finances were a big factor in applications. He cared little for where he went other than that it was affordable. Because of that, too many reach schools with good aid got on the list that he had no chance of getting into (Stanford, Vanderbilt and MIT, though admittedly, he never would have applied to MIT if his MIT-graduate brother had not “made” him apply). He applied to too many schools that I knew were likely unaffordable (out of the area Cal State schools and a few safety STEM schools).
He was looking for that one affordable school, and at the end of the app season, he had one extremely affordable school (Ivy) and seven marginally affordable schools (UCSD, UCI, Purdue, UAH, U Rochester, Northeastern, SDSU), which were only marginally affordable because of his outside $6000 a year National Merit Scholarship.Without it, most of the other schools would not have been affordable.
I can well see why low-income, high stats kids apply to top schools.