Whiz kid offered Google job out of high school but got rejected by 16 colleges —now he’s suing for discrimination

From NY Post.com (Mar. 3, 2025):

Stanley Zhong was a near-perfect college applicant.

Out of the more than 2 million kids who take the SAT annually, he’s one of roughly 2,000 to score a 1590 or higher.

His high school GPA was a 4.42 on a 4.0 scale. He even had an offer in hand to work a PhD-level job at Google before graduating high school.

Stanley, who intended to study computer science, also managed his own startup, e-document signature platform Rabbit-Sign, while still a high schooler.

By anyone’s expectations, the Palo Alto, Calif., teen should have been Harvard- or MIT-bound. Yet Stanley, now 19, was met with disappointment after disappointment in 2023 when college admissions letters started trickling in.

Stanley was rejected by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin.

Only the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Maryland — with respective 31% and 44% admissions rates — accepted him. Stanley’s father, Nan Zhong, was astounded.

“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 told The 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.”

With just two offers of admission out of 18 schools, Nan became convinced that his whiz kid must have been discriminated against — and decided to take the schools who rejected his son to court.

“There’s nothing more un-American than this,” Nan said of the alleged discrimination his son faced. “I don’t really think [these schools] give a damn about the damage they’re doing to these kids.”

Asian American students have long gotten the short end of the stick when it comes to affirmative action. The Supreme Court outlawed affirmative action in college admissions in June 2023, finding that Asian students were systemically overlooked.

Because Stanley applied for admissions shortly before the ruling, the Zhongs decided to sue colleges located in states that had pre-existing laws prohibiting racial discrimination in admissions.

Affirmative action has been banned at public universities in Stanley’s home state of California since 1996.

So far, the family has filed lawsuits against the University of California system and the University of Washington, alleging the schools “[engaged] in racially discriminatory admissions practices that disadvantage highly qualified Asian-American applicants.”

“[Stanley’s admissions] results stand in stark contrast to his receipt of a full-time job offer from Google for a position requiring a PhD degree or equivalent practical experience,” the lawsuit claims. “Stanley’s experience is emblematic of a broader pattern of racial discrimination against highly qualified Asian-American applicants at UC.” [read more]

Disgraceful. This is racism by these woke universities.