Ivy League universities reject many high school students

Many well prepared high school seniors have been rejected from Ivy League universities. Students with 4.0 GPA’s and perfect SAT scores have been rejected from their schools of choice from all over the country. The Ivy League colleges rejected the highest amount of students ever. For example:
“Stanford received a record 23,956 undergraduate applications for the fall term, accepting 2,456 students, meaning the school took 10.3 percent of applicants,” said the New York Times.
Other four-year colleges and universities did not receive as many applications, so those schools did not reject a lot of students.

With all this competition, how do high school students prepare to stand out from each other? What else are they suppose to do to be accepted to their top university?

Many high schools students whose goal is to be accepted to one of these Ivy League schools already have a lot of things on their plate, many extra-curricular activities, AP classes, community service, and tutoring, to do more for them to be accepted into these universities may be asking too much from them.

This is the link to the article:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/04/education/04colleges.html?ex=1176868800&en=55fbd6a04e1739df&ei=5070&emc=eta1