Getting into a target school is extraordinarily hard

Very true, but you'll get in somewhere decent.

Just the general quality standard you'd expect of an Ivy student, seems pretty self explanatory

Agreed, I would assume those with less than a 3.4 GPA may not do so. But I imagine that moonshot applications are more common in the US because the consequences of not getting in are minimal. In the UK, wasting a spot on a moonshot application essentially decreases your chance of simply going to university by 20%. Much higher risk. And this is evident in other cases where you don't have checks and balances e.g. job applications.

There's a fair amount of inaccuracy or misleading statements in your comment so I'll approach them in order. Firstly, I actually agree with you. No doubt more British students may want to go to US schools compared to the other way around. This is also because the US has more "elite schools" as you say. Even as an UG, once you've removed LSE or Oxbridge others such as KCL, ICL or UCL are good but not comparable to Yale, Stanford etc. So I agree with you there.

As for the placement thing, I assume you're talking about IB. There are a couple of points to consider here. The first is that most applicants will keep to their local markets (US students mainly to the US and EU students mainly to the EU). Thing is, in the US you have many more spots available simply because you can hire people without restrictions in more cities (NYC, Boston, LA, SF, Dallas, Houston etc). In the UK you really only have London with a handful of jobs in Manchester. As for the broader EU, you have language limitations for cities like Frankfurt, Paris, Madrid or Milan. So if you look at how many of these top tier students place into BBs or EBs, then yes the numbers are higher in the US. But not necessarily because they're better, its because its easier and you have fewer restrictions.

Another thing that impacts IB placement is educational background. In the US you "go to college" and can pretty much mix and match subjects. In the end, the school you went to matters more than what you studied. Since in British schools (and European ones for that matter) you enroll in a specific course, that limits your ability to end up in IB because they take people only from certain courses (business, finance, maths etc) which in turn increases competition for those courses. Yes, you occasionally have some geography or history people finding their way into IB but that's rare. Since in the UK the balance of course and brand name is more equal than in the US, you have fewer people able to get in.

As for the "not considering them in our rankings" point, we both know that's not true. And I'll admit that because its the same on the EU side. If I scan a CV from Brown or Cornell, whilst they may not be H/Y/P/S I still go "ooo Cornell, let me read a bit more". And I know this for a fact because at my firm I coordinate recruitment for Juniors and we have some US people coming from target UK and EU schools which are often at the top of the CV pile for NYC, Boston and SF.

And just to be clear, I don't mean to shit on US target schools. Everyone knows they're great, tough to get in to and give you excellent preparation. The whole point of my initial comment and subsequent replies was that people need to look at the numbers in more detail and not break an arm jerking themselves off because they got into a school with a "4% acceptance rate".

It's not that hard to get a top score on the SATs. Take all the tests in the Blue Book, and then if you still need practice, take all of the tests from other reputable sources like the Princeton Review. Then go through every single wrong answer, and understand why you got it wrong, so you'll know for next time. I got a 2300 in 2016. I was doing practice tests back in my second year of high school. Then you have to make sure you're covered with interesting extra-curricular activities too, which is a whole other ballgame.

It's a grind, I remember how stressed I was in high school, but it just requires a bit of grit and determination.

Jumping off of what you’re staring too is another interesting factor: your surroundings. Not saying we are all products of our environments but sometimes people completely don’t know what they don’t know.

My fiancée didn’t even realize there were prep courses for the SAT because they weren’t offered at her high school. She didn’t realize she could retake the test because nobody told her. She grew up in a poor area and everyone advised against student loans. The local state school was her only option from the start. She got accepted into much higher ranked universities but cost was the determining factor.

She never considered IB obviously. So school ranking didn’t really matter. She was told that a college degree is a college degree. She graduated summa cum laude because she’s smart, so intelligence and work ethic aren’t the only determining factors.

One could argue, “Well she should have known.” And that’s sort of fair. But it’s easy to not know what you don’t know if you’re the first one in your family to go to college and go to high school in a very poor area and not stumble across US News rankings.