‘The Asian community is fed up with repeated, outrageous college admission stories like this’
He had a 4.42 GPA and a near perfect 1590 score on his SAT. Yet he was rejected by 16 colleges he applied to. Now he’s suing for discrimination.
Stanley Zhong, who ended up taking a PhD-level software engineer job at Google out of high school, is fighting for other Asian-American students who might face the same dilemma — a kid who is perfect on paper but rejected due to his ethnicity.
At least, that’s what the Zhong family hopes to prove in court.
“The story is bigger than Stanley himself,” his father, Nan Zhong, recently told ABC Bay Area News. “And what we’re trying to get out of this is a fair treatment of Asian applicants going forward, including my other kids and my future grandkids.”
The lawsuit, filed Feb. 11, names the University of California system and campus leaders as defendants — as well as leaders at all five UC schools he applied to that had rejected him.
The Sacramento Bee reported:
Stanley, who’s now 19, and Nan Zhong are suing the University of California for racial discrimination over a pattern of discriminating against “highly qualified Asian-American applicants.”
Stanley and Nan Zhong are representing themselves after multiple parties they contacted declined to take the case or didn’t answer, the complaint notes.
… As a result, they turned to AI to help create their nearly 300-page filing. “The legal complaint was largely written by ChatGPT and Gemini,” Nan Zhong said. “We are going to file lawsuits against more universities very soon.”
A University of California spokesperson told McClatchy News that it hadn’t been served with the lawsuit as of Feb. 20. … The spokesperson noted California banned considering race in admissions in 1996 and said the University of California has followed that law accordingly.
Zhong further explains his story on his website, Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination, or SWORD:
During the COVID pandemic, when the lockdown created a surging demand for e-signing, Stanley was unhappy that DocuSign didn’t provide any relief. So, he created an unlimited free e-signing service named RabbitSign. Built on Amazon Web Services, it was designed and implemented so well that Amazon’s Well-Architected Review concluded that it was “one of the most efficient and secure accounts” they’d ever reviewed. Amazon decided to feature it in a case study–a prestigious recognition that is notoriously difficult to attain, even for seasoned professionals. Naturally, Amazon also wanted to hire him, but Google acted more swiftly. Five randomly selected Google engineers devoted no less than ten hours collectively to evaluating Stanley’s skills, including his technical expertise and soft skills, such as teamwork. Based solely on these assessments, without any external influence, Google extended Stanley a full-time employment offer for a position requiring a Ph.D. or equivalent practical experience. This offer was made in September 2023, shortly after Stanley turned 18. (Google’s compensation structure is tied to the level of its employees’ positions, creating a natural disincentive to over-assess an employee’s qualifications or role.)
In contrast, a few months before the Google job offer, he received disappointing college application results. He applied to eighteen colleges, but was rejected by sixteen of them, including all five University of California (UC) schools to which he applied. Apparently, his resume was good enough for Google to consider him for a position that normally requires a Ph.D. Yet the same achievements, along with a 3.97 GPA and a 1590 SAT score, plus many other achievements such as the highest level of the Presidential Volunteer Service Award, were not sufficient for undergraduate admissions at the UC.
…I received tons of emails from Asian-American parents and students sharing similar stories, including applicants as qualified as Stanley if not more being rejected by all colleges they applied to. As these cases accumulated, a pattern of racial discrimination against Asian-American students became clear. The Asian community is fed up with repeated, outrageous college admission stories like this.
This is the second lawsuit to be filed against the UC system in recent weeks alleging racial discrimination in admissions.
IMAGE: ABC Bay Area News
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