Stanley Zhong was a near perfect college applicant.
Out of the more than two 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. And 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, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, University of Washington and 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 2 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.”
They are seeking compensatory and punitive damages and “such other and further relief as [the] court deems just and proper.” The family also recently filed another suit against the University of Michigan, which the court clerk is currently processing.
“In the Harvard [Supreme Court] case, the question was whether affirmative action is legal or not,” Nan explained. “Our case is a matter of enforcing the law and holding schools responsible. It’s great the Supreme Court ruled in that case, but I think the enforcement is going to be a lot harder than just declaring it unconstitutional.”
Many colleges have been accused of exploiting loopholes to manipulate racial demographics of incoming classes in spite of the Supreme Court’s ruling, often artificially suppressing Asian American numbers.
Stanley decided to take up Google’s job offer and has been working as a full-time software engineer since October. Google first tried to recruit him when he was just 13 because his online coding was so advanced the company figured he must be an adult.
Though he hasn’t ruled out college in the future, he’s decided to step back from media attention after facing blowback over his lawsuits on the internet.
“We haven’t seen more cases like Stanley’s, because the kind of open hostility towards Asian students standing up for their rights is unbelievable,” his father said.
Nan, an immigrant from China who also works as a software engineer, also has a 16-year-old son and says he’s “very much worried about the prospect he’s facing” in the college admissions process.
“My other son is part of the reason we’re fighting this battle,” he said. “We’re doing this for other Asian kids, including my younger kid and my future grandkids.”
Nan is representing the family in court himself. He used artificial intelligence to help outline the complaints and said the lawsuits would not be possible without AI.
“The reason we’re representing ourselves is not that we’d like to,” he said. “Lawyers leaning left didn’t want to take the case. And then the lawyers on the right side think that the courts in California [and other states] are going to be too biased.”
He’s looking for two things to help build his case: “More plaintiffs and whistleblowers [from inside the university system].”
Nan says what motivates him most is fighting for the mental well-being of other Asian American kids who feel unmoored by rejection despite their tireless hard work.
“This really damages their mental health, creating a sense of helplessness and hopelessness,” he said. “If you look at Stanley’s case as a reference point, even if you’re as good as somebody with a PhD degree, you still might not even get undergraduate admissions.”
