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I will take a stand here: if they are under the impression that a 1460 SAT on its own is impressive enough that it is notable that it did not get them into Cornell, they are not an ivy league caliber student. Just flatly, they do not understand the system.
-- A 1460 SAT isn't really that impressive. It's just...not that big a deal. Even looking at the medians at schools isn't enough, because most of the students at those schools will have a whole pile of other stuff in their resume. Good High School GPA, good extracurriculars, good essays. Any given student might have lacking extracurriculars, a weak GPA, or have written a meandering poorly reasoned essay about how superior he thinks he is to the hoi polloi. He might have put down Stormfront Juniors as his extracurricular and written his essay about his admiration for Rudolf Hess. You just don't know.
-- Admissions are pretty random anyway. Any individual student getting rejected from any individual school isn't notable. At all. Personal story: I applied to all the T14 law schools. I only got into one, waitlisted at the rest. That one offered me a full tuition scholarship. Which makes no sense, because I didn't even get into the schools they were trying to buy me out of. My point being not only was my admissions result random, the admissions team at my school (who presumably know a lot about that kind of thing) didn't expect that result and tried to bribe me not to go to the schools that didn't admit me. Further, HYS all waitlisted me, effectively indicating that I was marginal as a candidate but on balance I was "good enough" for HYS, I was of the caliber of student they were looking for. Georgetown flat rejected me! Georgetown! You never know where you will or won't be admitted on an individual basis, at best it's a probability.
-- Not knowing the above indicates to me that the people involved aren't plugged into the gunner universe of students who put together Ivy League resumes in high school, and therefore probably didn't put together an ivy league caliber resume, and therefore didn't "deserve" to get in. Whether that is the system we want is irrelevant, it's the system we have. It's not about being white, it's about not being a gunner.
I didn’t apply to all T14 but applied to 12/14. Was accepted at one; waitlisted at pretty much all of them. It is to a certain extent yield protection. I focused on the Chicago - Columbia - NYU tier (or at least the tier at the time — I understand USN heavily changed their rankings recently) to get off the waitlist as those appeared to be reasonably the most likely schools I could get into given my grades / LSAT. You generally have a good shot of getting off waitlists if you show you are really interested in that school and ultimately I had success with that.
This is what you would expect. Let's assume among qualified applicants (qualified as in good grades, scores, etc.) the odds of getting in is 10%. So if you apply to 14, you have a 77% chance of getting into at least one.
It's what you expect if the result is essentially random, or contains a random element.
That's not how most people view it, most assume that it's like lifting weights. If one can press 225 there's a 100% chance one can press 205, and a near 100% chance one can squat 225. People broadly view college admin that way, if you get into 15 you definitely get into 20 etc.
College admissions are really more like dating: you might be hot or you might not be, and that helps your odds, but you can never look at a girl and say "x guy should definitely fall in love with you." You can say it's odd if a hot girl can't get any dates at all, but even then it often has something to do with her. If many hot girls can't get dates, you can say something about the system, but nothing about individual girls or boys.
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IMO I am not sure how much the kid in question blew this up. I think someone else just claimed it and it got trending. So he may have known he was a reach.
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