> Good colleges are easy. The top few colleges are very hard

Define "good" and "top".

Ivies, Ivy Tier privates (Stanford, MIT, Duke, Northwestern, Chicago, NYU, Caltech, Georgetown, CMU), and Ivy Tier public schools (Cal, UCLA, UCSD, Mich, UIUC, UW, UT, GT, Purdue, UNC Chapel Hill, UVA) all recruit from the same student body. Thanks to the Common App, UC App, Coalition App, and ApplyTexas it's marginal effort to apply to all the colleges above in addition to the "good" tier.

The Good tier of publics (the rest of the UCs, the rest of the Big 10, UTD, SJSU, CalPoly, NCSU, William&Mary, VT, Rutgers) and privates (Claremont Colleges, Seven Sisters, Vandy, etc) end up with plenty of kids who couldn't mkae it to the top which also makes them more competitive.

Outcomes at Good and Top are the same for most cases, but both are similarly competitive. The kind of profile that gets you into CS@UCR today would have gotten you into EECS@Berkeley a decade ago.