@friedegg : “The college (undergraduate) admissions process is a largely unregulated black box, and most schools provide little transparency about how they decide who receives an acceptance letter.” If you’re really determined to set your foot on the “farm”, you can always do so by going there several years later for a graduate degree (e.g., MBA, JD, MS, MA, MD, or Ph.D) since most GS admissions, IMHO, are more transparent, race-blinded and merit-based to a certain extent.
For example, here is a link to Stanford’s MS&E (so-called the technical MBA at Stanford) MS admission statistics:
https://msande.stanford.edu/admissions/graduate/mse-ms-admission-statistics
Acceptance rate (~10% in recent years) is not as cut-throat competitive as UG admission (~3%) and most importantly, again, it’s more merit-based.
Good luck to you at whichever school you attend!