> Grinding grades and academics is absolutely a path the top tier universities like Berkeley or UCLA, even if you won't get in the S tier private schools.

Yeah. We are talking about different types of schools.

For one, Cal and UCLA both admit a lot of students. It’s just not as competitive. Additionally, it’s fairly easy for a decent grinder student to go to a feeder JuCo and transfer to either of these schools (which would be a fine outcome for the “ESL immigrant parents” you gave as an example).

Second, while Cal and UCLA are top-tier public schools (along with schools like UMich, UVa, and UTexas), I don’t consider them elite in terms of undergrad programs [1]. Any resident of California who gets into Stanford or an Ivy would be able to get into either of those (excepting anomalies like unusually high departmental requirements at some UC schools like Cal).

So sure, if the goal (esp. for California residents) is to get into a UC school, going the grinder route is fine — overkill in most cases, but fine. This will be less than ideal if they are also considering elite schools like Stanford or Ivies.

[1] What makes an undergrad program elite? The short answer is drive and the ability to get things done.

If you take the top 1000 admits from Stanford and compare them to the top 1000 admits at Cal, you may not see much difference in terms of raw intellect — plenty of super smart people in both groups. But the Stanford students will be more ambitious, they will push each other much harder (and in most cases learn more), and they will achieve more than the Cal students. Note that this isn’t a knock on Cal students — it’s just a different way of approaching school and life that is quite apparent when you interact with enough folks from each group.

Stanford, an elite school, can and does select for these traits. Cal just can’t be as picky due to the large number of admits and certain state policies.