Nova does have wealthier demographics than Harvard. Except at the very top (which is where the most money is).
Nova median family income is $196k. Harvard $169k.
Nova top 20% families are 75%. Harvard 67%.
Nova and Harvard both have top 1% families of 15%.
Nova has 1.4% families from the top 0.1%. 3% at Harvard.
Debatable, but off topic. 
@DeepBlue86 “Plenty of other places have grade inflation, by the way - I think it’s symptomatic of a larger problem in which students and their parents are treated like customers (possibly to justify the $70k/yr cost of attendance at a place like Harvard - although Princeton seems to be an honorable exception).”
Exactly what’s going on, Deresiewicz in his “Excellent Sheep” book notes that professors and students have entered a mutual non aggression pact. From the book, “Students want to do as little as possible. Profs are rewarded for research, especially at elite schools, so they want to spend as little time as possible on their classes. To the extent teaching matters at all in professional advancement, assessments are based on student evaluations, which notoriously correlate with grades…The answer all around is higher arks for shoddier works.” And he brings up the point as you note about students being customers which implies that college is a business and things like ROI have taken precedence.
“there’s a certain level of institutional indifference at Harvard to undergrads that’s more pronounced than elsewhere”
I think this is BS. My point of view is someone who transferred from an excellent small LAC to Harvard College and then became a Harvard grad student, so I have an unusual degree of personal experience to use for comparison’s sake. Frankly, it isn’t even logical, because there is exactly one employee at Harvard (the president) who shares responsibility for undergraduates and students in the professional schools. I don’t have time to respond more today except that I’m an example of an alum living an impossible dream outside of the corporate world, and some of us get here by way of law school.
Princeton is so theoretical in comparison to the others, it’s not really a fair comparison. Any applicant who knows what they are doing will look into this aspect of Princeton and decide if theoretical is the way to go for them.
“Undergraduates, what are those?” Comment by a faculty colleague when I told him I was busy with teaching responsibilities, in addition to research. Tongue-in-cheek, but still.
I think there are poets who go to Bain at all the top schools–the difference is probably just a matter of degree at Harvard. The Bain people want them a little more, too.
Back on the question of preference, it occurred to me that for my kids there were many highly selective schools to which they did not apply that they would have preferred to any of their matches or safeties. This was simply because that even for a family that believed in applying to a lot of reaches, there is a limit to what is feasible, and you still need matches and safeties.
In the case of QMP, there were deliberate non-applications to some of the top schools. The only one that foundered for lack of time was McGill, which was added after some initial experience with how “holistic” admission works in practice. Shortly after QMP started looking into McGill, it became apparent that the SCEA round was non-representative of all other outcomes.
@Hunt It’s funny, but each of my kids insisted that there were no highly selective schools to which they did not apply that they would have preferred to any of their matches or safeties. I wanted them to apply to more, but they didn’t like those colleges. We did make our second child apply to one such college as a favor to us, but he put in his “Why X” essay that he didn’t want to go there but his parents were making him apply. So that was a waste.
I made our older son apply to Harvard. He hadn’t been particularly impressed at reunions and it’s not a CS powerhouse, though they the same placements as all the other top schools. When he went to accepted students day he discovered that Harvard had a large group of nerdy, board game playing STEM types just like himself. It may also have a lot of future Investment bankers and corporate types, but that’s not everyone. He sent the exact same essays everywhere - bascially “I’m a computer nerd. Take me or leave me.” He ended up being pretty impressed by Harvard, but decided total immersion and a (much) bigger department was the way to go.
Parchment cross admit stats seem to me to be the best indicators of the colleges actually preferred by students.