"This scenario played out exactly for a good friend of my kiddo.
Father is in STEM and mother is a stay-at-home mom. I am guessing that the father is making good money (I believe he has an advance degree from S) and most likely the family will not qualify for financial aid at elite schools. The kid is very smart and hard working. Father made it clear that he was only willing to break the bank for H and P knowing that the kid can get into our various state schools (they are quite good) for sure.
The kid got waitlisted at the ivies and ended up at our flagship state school with Regent scholarship. Last I heard, she was doing very well there.
I think if you are upper-middle class, you really need to consider whether paying $65K a year for a private college is prudent. YMMV"
OP’s original question seemed like it could be phrased a few different ways with a different meaning each way. If the question is, “should reasonably well-off but not mega-rich parents pay for whatever college their kid wants to go to?” my answer is similar to the family above… we have told our kids that we can afford around an in-state (CA) level for them and if they want to go private, they need to get scholarships to make up the difference. But that said, if one of them really really wanted to attend something like MIT and actually got accepted, we might be able to come up with the difference. Maybe.
One could also read that question as, “what do you think about families who will only pay for college if it’s a top-20 school?” In which case my answer would be, “that’s crazy and part of the problem of why kids these days are so stressed out trying to get into top-20 schools.” Or another way to read that question was, “It seems unrealistic that a family with this income could actually afford to fully fund their kid’s college tuition… what do you think?”