[stanford_labrat]

At my high school the "target" schools for the top performers in the class were usually some kind of high ranked school or ivy for this reason. I don't remember any of my classmates (myself included) really factoring in specific details of the institution itself for whether we preferred one over the other, rather we just looked at the top 20 list and applied to the ones we liked. The logic being that if we landed somewhere we could basically be pretty successful in whatever field we ended up choosing. So, often that looked like apply to all ivies + a safety or two.

I was rank 8/432 and applied to: Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Stanford, Pomona, Rice, and UW. Got rejected from everywhere except UW so that's where I ended up going. I think only one other person in the top 10 went to UW with me, and he had plans to be a CS major. Funnily enough over 50% of my graduating class just went to UW because it was: good enough, close to home, and relatively affordable.