Rejected by 16 colleges despite Google job offer, teen files lawsuit against University of California

Stanley Zhong was offered a job by Google straight out of high school. Of the 2 million students who take the SAT every year, he was one out of roughly 2,000 who scored more than 1,590 on the test. His high school GPA stood at 4.42 on a 4.0 scale. When still in school, he built and managed a startup called Rabbit-Sign to provide unlimited free e-signing.

By all accounts, the California teenager should have gotten into a good school, if not an Ivy League institute. But when college admission results started trickling in for Stanley in 2023, he was unpleasantly surprised to learn that he had been rejected by 16 of the 18 colleges he applied to.

Stanley, now 19, and his father Nan Zhong are suing for discrimination, reported The Sacramento Bee. According to his LinkedIn profile, Stanley is currently working as a software engineer with Google

Rejected by 16 colleges

Palo Alto-based Stanley Zhong attended the prestigious Gunn High School and wanted to study computer science in college. He applied to 18 colleges, and was rejected by 16 of them.

The colleges that rejected Stanley were: Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.

Of these, five were University of California schools - UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UC Los Angeles, UC San Diego and UC Santa Barbara.

Despite his impressive academic record and a Google job offer in hand, Stanley managed to get into only two schools - University of Texas at Austin and the University of Maryland.

His father was astonished. “I did hear that Asians seem to be facing a higher bar when it comes to college admissions, but I thought maybe it’s an urban legend,” Nan Zhong told The New York Post. “But then when the rejections rolled in one after another, I was dumbfounded. What started with surprise turned into frustration and then finally it turned into anger.”

The lawsuit

Stanley and his father are now suing the University of California for racial discrimination over a pattern of discriminating against “highly qualified Asian-American applicants.”

“What we’re trying to get out of this is a fair treatment for future Asian applicants going forward, including my other kids and my future grandkids,” Nan Zhong said in an interview with KGO-TV, as quoted by The Sacramento Bee.

Nan has confirmed that more lawsuits against other schools are in the pipeline, saying: “We are going to file lawsuits against more universities very soon.”

The father-son duo reached out to multiple parties who all declined to take the case. They are now representing themselves.

Their 300-page filing was written with the help of ChatGPT and Gemini.

“Stanley’s rejection from these UC campuses was not based on his qualifications but on his race, as an Asian-American,” the lawsuit says.

“While it is true that Google’s job offer came after UC’s rejections — meaning UC could not have foreseen that Google would recognize Stanley’s skills had already reached the Ph.D. level — the fundamental issue remains: the technical achievements included in Stanley’s UC applications were substantially the same as those sent to Google,” it says.