You make an important distinction, hangNthere, that I failed to make – the difference in the recruiting experience of girls v. boys. I have a son, and the OP is also a male; so I got stuck in that mindset. You’re absolutely right that many female swimmers peak in high school and will have to show very fast times by late in their junior year of high school – generally speaking times that will score (or nearly score) in the Ivy League Championship. Young men, on the other hand, will likely get faster every year of high school and then college, and it’s again unlikely that very many 16-year-olds will be swimming A and B Final times. Some recruits certainly will, but the numbers won’t begin to fill the rosters of eight Ivy League swim teams.
As for Stanford, I wasn’t challenging your assertions there. That school sits at the apex of academics and sports in America, it can certainly recruit Olympic level swimmers. Also, Stanford can give sports scholarships, so it’s really a different kettle of fish.
And, yes, HYP are probably the fastest swim schools in the Ivies, but the OP is speaking generally about the entire league. And I already suggested to him (OP) that Harvard was super fast and probably out of reach. Unless he gets much faster, he should be targeting Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Columbia, and Penn. I can pretty much guarantee that a male swimmer with a couple of USA Jr. National times will draw considerable interest from several of those schools depending on their particular needs that recruiting cycle. Our OP isn’t quite there yet, of course.
My larger point buried amid all of this is that we don’t have to endlessly speculate about how fast is fast enough to be recruited at Ivy League schools. We don’t even have to listen to what the coaches or their recruiting assistants say. We need only look at the actual times of actual recruits. Those numbers are out there; we can point to them; and they generally fall well below A and B Final times.