I was probably in the “bottom” of this list of cohorts, despite a 1500+ current equivalent SAT as I was barely top 20% of my HS class and pretty much everyone was top 10%. After a rough first age-17 semester, I was Dean’s List the last two years. Several of my val/sal/top HS student fraternity brothers struggled and some failed out.
I don’t think this segmentation works at a lot of schools. Not everyone at MIT/Harvard/Stanford/etc. is going to be in the top 5% of their college class., unlike HS. And the students who just clawed their way into the last few admission slots are extremely capable and can probably end up anywhere in a “class rank”.