<p>Yea, I do think some of the things admissions at Stanford look for are different than east coast peer schools.</p>
<p>That being said, many (perhaps most?) of the people at Stanford that I have met got into many comparable schools: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, MIT, Cal, Caltech, Julliard, etc.</p>
<p>However, Stanford does draw about 40% of its student body from California. And a very large proportion of the student body (heard as high as 1/8th?) are student athletes (D1), some of whom probably wouldn’t be recruited at HYP due to the Ivy league rules.</p>
<p>The anecdotal consensus seems to be that Stanford places less emphasis on standardized test scores and other more objective factors, and focuses more on subjectivity. Of course, all top schools do this to some extent, but there seems to be slightly less of 2400 SAT 36 ACT 4.0 Valedictorians: less of applicants who are “perfect” on paper.</p>