This isn't all about the Ivy's recruitment. I am from a small (10k population) town in Mid Missouri and currently an MIT student. In my graduating class of 150

This isn't all about the Ivy's recruitment. I am from a small (10k population) town in Mid Missouri and currently an MIT student. In my graduating class of 150 there were maybe 6 that went out of state and only a couple that didn't go to a neighboring state. I was always gunning for "top tier" because my parents were professors and had gone to top tier colleges as well, but the high school counselors were absolutely useless to me. They didn't know how to deal with the common app and none of the scholarships that they could point me to apply to were eligible for anything out of state. I got the same amount of advertisements from out of state schools as in-state after taking the ACT, but there was a feeling at my high school of anti-elite schools.