I think it’s a mistake to paint all the Ivies with one brush, as there are significant differences amongst them. Princeton, Columbia and Cornell have reputations of being hard, with the first two likely to have a workload similar to Chicago. Some students, like my daughter at UChicago, do best in demanding environments. She has met the challenges and in doing so found out what she is capable of.
On the other hand, Yale and Harvard can be as easy a student wants to make it. My nephew said of his Yale experience, “it’s hard to get an A, but harder to get a C”. And part of the reason my type-A son chose Harvard was because he wanted to choose which areas he will work extremely hard in, and which areas he wanted to take easy.
Fit matters.