Stanley Zhong is a 19-year-old Asian-American software engineer from Palo Alto, California. Despite a near-perfect academic record, including a 4.42 GPA and a 1590 SAT score, Zhong was rejected by 16 of the 18 colleges he applied to, including prestigious institutions like MIT, Stanford, and UC Berkeley. This sparked outrage and accusations of racial discrimination in college admissions, leading Zhong and his father, Nan Zhong, to file lawsuits against the University of California system, the University of Washington, and the University of Michigan. These lawsuits argue that these institutions engaged in racial discrimination against Asian-American applicants, despite affirmative action being banned in California since 1996 and nationally struck down by the US Supreme Court in June 2023.
While still in high school, Zhong secured a full-time software engineering role at Google, a position typically requiring a Ph.D. or equivalent experience. He had also founded RabbitSign, a free electronic signature startup. Amazon recommended RabbitSign as a case study due to its architecture. Zhong's story has ignited a national conversation about transparency and fairness in college admissions, particularly for Asian-American students. He decided to defer his initial plans to attend the University of Texas at Austin in order to pursue his career at Google. His father is representing the family in court and is using AI to draft legal complaints.
