When I was in HS, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, there was still a strong focus on academics amongst my peers and their families, but college was much easier to get into. We applied to maybe 3 or 4, and most of my friends went to top schools. I recall sitting in a class senior year and the teacher asked us where we were going to college. The responses: " Harvard, Yale, MIT, WIlliams, Cal Tech, Smith, Vassar, Tufts, Pomona, Stanford, Wesleyan, SUNY Stonybrook, Brown, Pembroke, Swarthmore, Radcliffe, Princeton, Penn."
(yes this is when Radcliffe and Pembroke were still separate schools).
We all participated in ECs because we liked them, not because we were pressured into it or engaged in resume padding.
This was a public HS, and most of the students either went to local cc’s, state schools, trade schools or no college at all. We were a little “pre-college confidential” bubble, perhaps. The students in the honors and AP classes did not make up the majority of the class.