All high schools will have some kind of profile like this, but not all are posted for the general public, and the details on the profile may vary. You can ask a guidance counselor or college counselor for a copy of the most recent profile for your high school.
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The other thing that stands out on the Lynbrook profile is the over 40% intending to major in CS or Engineering which reframes the acceptance rate to UCB and UCLA for me.
Suddenly the 7-8% acceptance rate to those schools looks good instead of below average .
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Congratulations to all the adequate students who were admitted this year!!! 
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This needs a million percent emoji.
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Yes, that is fine. Adequate, even good students attending the flagships. Some are no doubt academic stars, some are not. They are not necessarily the best students in the state ( though some might be), but they are expected to be able to graduate. Not a bad use of taxpayer funds. Same is true for UT Austin.
A fine place to attend, not always the highest aspiration for the most academically qualified.
As long as we also describe some of the HYPSM admitted students as adequate. Because goodness knows, there are students admitted there with lower GPAs than students who are declined.
I think HYPSM is moving towards a more "adequate " model, but note that the bar for adequate is likely far different at MIT, say, than a flagship.
MIT also costs more than a flagship. In the group of top students at my son’s school, some applied to (and currently attend) HYPSM and the like, while others simply did not apply to these privates due to cost, and are attending UC. Anecdotally in this small sample of students, I don’t see a huge difference in “quality of student” between these two sets. But of course, these are just the students at the “high end” of those attending UC from our HS.
Yes, flagships usually offer the best cost proposition, and thus attracted more top students as a result. Re-casting flagships as schools for a broad range of citizens ( not necessarily academic superstars) does decrease that option for very smart but poorer students. Other states, like Alabama, can benefit from acquiring them.
Presumably all the students you know easily met the academic bars for those schools.
At MIT the bottom 25% still have close to perfect math SAT scores ( and a lot of math ability); MIT is reluctant to admit those it knows to have lesser ability.
Though the numbers aren’t recent, the bottom 25% at Berkeley was a far more attainable 660 in math SAT scores, a wider range of student ability to accomodate.
This is true for the tiny sample of students that I am thinking about, but of course it’s all anecdotal. My son at UCB also often talks with his buddy who is studying the same subject at MIT, including comparing their classes and exams and fellow students etc. (Students are often curious about the quality of education they are receiving and whether it might have been different, given a different outcome or college choice. So it can be interesting for them to compare with friends they knew well in HS.)
Of course, as you say, there is naturally going to be a wider range of students at any flagship than at a smaller, elite private school.
Edited to add: Just to clarify, although our HS doesn’t rank, I’m thinking of the set of students my son considered the best. My son didn’t consider himself among the top students at his HS… he is a good student and did as well in math and physics classes as these others, but when I asked him at one point if he thought he was in the top 10% he just laughed at me 
For those with access to the SF Chronicle, apparently the Palo Alto school system is trying to adopt a new system whereby grades reflect academic achievement ( yes, seriously).
The article says grades currently incorporate behavior, conduct, tardiness, helpfulness around the classroom-all sorts of unrelated things.
Yet another argument for standardized tests. Hard to believe anyone thinks grades are evidence of much anymore.
This comes up every cycle when disgruntled CA parents complain about how someone they know who is truly deserving didn’t get into the same high demand majors at the same “top” UCs. This is a fundamentally unserious solution to a difficult problem. No top x% model will work in the context of EECS/CS/Engg/insert high demand major admissions at UCB and UCLA.
Simple math using UCB as an example: at ~50% yield and 78% IS/non-instate split there are perhaps ~700 CS+ EECS CA admits. At Berkeley alone typically there were almost 1600 COE applicants in the GPA range of 4.8-5.0. Assuming you fill every spot simply from this group and assuming 50% of applicants were interested in EECS/CS, you will still not have enough spots since there are 800 kids for 700 spots.
From my perspective, the UCs have mastered the art of balancing various priorities while ensuring that every admit is stellar even if every stellar applicant isn’t admitted. There are simply not enough spots and its fruitless to extrapolate from an individual’s results.
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Your view on this emphasis on grading according to mastery of the material seems to have drastically evolved. Here are a few of your past comments on the topic from another thread . . .
My views are consistent. Grades were and should be based only on academic factors, never conduct/attendance, etc. I disagree with but can live with grading towards “mastery” regardless of timeliness or number of attempts, though I think it does the students no favors and infantilizes them, at least by high school. Still, students would eventually demonstrate subject matter competence, which may be enough in some fields
Personally, I am glad my kids had standardized test results which offered objective appraisals of their subject mastery at a given point in time. It helped them, and me.
If Cali taxpayers are happy, that is all that should matter in Cali.
In the real world of US high schools, it is unlikely that a teacher will not be influenced by conduct, attendance, etc., especially in more discussion-based classes (e.g. foreign language) where class participation is important and (subjectively) considered in grading. Now, you may get your wish if someone started a high school based on the UK model, where the entire grade is how you did on the final exam (but then there can still be issues with classes where the target academic achievement is better measured in ways other than exams, such as English or history grading based on term papers and the like).
Beyond grades, many highly selective colleges (not UCs) use letters of recommendation, which are even more likely to be influenced by conduct, attendance, etc…
In the real world, most people are able to separate, at least to a degree, a person’s performance from their personal like of a person. My kids had plenty of teachers who disliked them but gave them As, or alternatively liked them but gave them poor grades. Adults can’t help their unconscious bias, but usually try to overcome that. It appears that in Palo Alto, grades were specifically and consciously raised due to nonacademic factors. I didn’t realize that wasn’t the norm everywhere. How incredibly patronizing to base grades on behavioral/conduct skills rather than actual performance; do those teachers just assume the students are not capable of actually performing?
Most of us prefer bridges built by competent engineers, and aircraft piloted by competent pilots, regardless of their citizenship/classroom helpfulness skills. In some fields, competence matters more than others. Reference letters are designed to address non-academic factors; grades are not.
Probably parental pressure that seems common in that kind of school.
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Of course there are variances, but the norm everywhere is to dock grades for reasons that aren’t related to mastery of material, such as attendance, participation, neatness, spelling (where spelling isn’t being tested), doing homework, doing the reading, turning in homework on time, missing answers on homework whether or not the person eventually figures it out, etc.
Another example of not grading based on the mastery of the material is a teacher/school imposed curve requiring a certain percentage of ABC grades, no matter the level of mastery of material.
In other words, the norm everywhere has always been to consider additional factors other than mastery. And this current movement is generally opposed by those who support more a more traditional approach to education.
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delete