Stanley Zhong had a 4.42 grade point average, a nearly perfect SAT score, had bested adults in competitive coding competitions and started his own electronic signing service all while still in high school.
When it came time to apply to colleges, Zhong’s family wasn’t overly concerned about his prospects even amid an increasingly competitive admissions environment.
But, by the end of his senior year in Palo Alto in 2023, Zhong received rejection letters to 16 of the 18 colleges where he applied, including five University of California campuses that his father had figured would be safety schools.
“It was surprise upon surprise upon surprise, and then it turned into frustration and, eventually, anger,” his father, Nan Zhong, told The Times in a recent interview. “And I think both Stanley and I felt the same way, that something is really funky here.”
Less than a year later, as a college freshman in Texas, Zhong was hired by Google for a software engineering position that typically requires an advanced degree. Now, he and his father are suing several of the colleges that rejected him.
Zhong, 19, and his father, Nan Zhong, filed a series of lawsuits this year alleging that the colleges, including those in the University of California system, engaged in “racially discriminatory admissions practices that disadvantage highly qualified Asian-American applicants,” according to the civil complaints, which were written with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The most recent lawsuit was filed against Cornell University last week.
Stanley Zhong declined a Times request for an interview through his father.
The consideration of race in college admissions has been a fervent debate in America for decades, becoming increasingly so since the Supreme Court struck down in 2023 affirmative action policies at colleges and universities that use race as a factor in deciding who is admitted. The ruling slammed back previous court decisions dating back to 1978 that held that universities had a compelling interest in seeking racial diversity on campuses and could consider the race of Black and Latino students as a plus factor when choosing among qualified applicants.
Supporters of affirmative action argue that it helps level the playing field for disadvantaged groups and creates a more diverse student body. But those who oppose it say the idea undermines merit-based selection processes and discriminates against qualified applicants.
In California, the University of California and California State University systems have long been prohibited from using race as a factor in admissions.
“We believe this to be a meritless suit that seeks to distract us from our mission to provide California students with a world class education,” a University of California spokesperson wrote in a statement to The Times. “Since the consideration of race in admissions was banned in California in 1996, the University of California has adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law. We stand by our admission policies and our record of expanding access for all qualified students.”
While the UC application collects information about a student’s race and ethnicity, those details are only used for data gathering and are not shared with application reviewers or considered during the admission process, according to the UC spokesman.
Asian Americans have long had the highest admission rates among first-year Californians compared with other racial and ethnic groups. UC’s fall 2024 enrollment data, released in January, showed that Asian Americans made up the largest group of undergrads at 36.3%.
But Nan Zhong alleges in the lawsuit that a high percentage of Asian Americans enrolled doesn’t prove the colleges aren’t using discriminatory practices. He cites a California state auditor’s report from 2020 that found University of California campuses did not adequately train or supervise the readers who rate applications, potentially creating a risk that their evaluations would be “unfair or inconsistent.”
“Campuses have not taken critical steps to protect applicants from reader bias,” the report states. “They have provided application readers with applicants’ demographic information, including their names, native languages, and birthplaces, which could bias the readers’ evaluations.”
A spokesperson for Cornell declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The U.S. Department of Justice last week said it would investigate four California universities — UCLA, UC Irvine, Stanford and UC Berkeley — for potential “illegal DEI” in admissions, suggesting the schools flouted state and federal laws by using race as a factor when evaluating college applicants.
Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi said in a statement that she and President Trump are “dedicated to ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity across the country.”
The college admissions process has long been shrouded in mystery, which can contribute to the concern that some students are held to a higher standard than others, for reasons other than grades and test scores, experts say. Admissions for highly sought after majors such as computer science makes admissions even more competitive with limited space, particularly within the UC system, and surging demand.
“For the UCs, you only need a small weakness to get a rejection,” said Jeffrey Haig, a college admissions consultant in Orange County.
While colleges aren’t permitted to look at race, they can look at a student’s background, life experiences and challenges, which can become an important part of an application, Haig said.
Zhong’s aptitude for programming was evident early in his teen years, according to his father. He won second place in the MIT Battlecode’s high school division and advanced to the Google Code Jam Coding Contest semifinal, a global coding competition.
In 2019, when he was 13 years old, Zhong was approached by a Google recruiter to discuss software engineering positions at the company. Given his age, the company couldn’t proceed with a full-time position, but the recruiter offered to save his resume for future follow-up, according to an email exchange included in the lawsuit.
In 2021, Zhong launched RabbitSign, an unlimited free e-signing service that his father said stemmed from Stanley’s desire to help provide a cost-effective alternative to other paid signing services when demand surged during the pandemic.
“Those things would be hard to achieve even for professionals,” Nan Zhong said. “And so we thought that for him — with those kinds of credentials — that an undergrad computer science program should be fairly reasonable for him to get into. But unfortunately, that turned out to be not the case at all.”
Zhong applied to computer science programs at UC Davis, UC Berkeley, UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, UC San Diego and California Polytechnic State University. He also sought admission to several private or out-of-state colleges, including MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, University of Washington and Caltech.
After the rejections started rolling in, Nan Zhong tried to figure out what had gone wrong. Did his son answer the personal insight questions in an odd way? Was there a glaring issue with his essay? College counselors examined his application and couldn’t find anything that explained the phenomenon, Nan Zhong said.
He also began hearing stories from Asian American families of their children also being denied admission despite having what they thought were solid applications.
“As the data started to pile on, I started thinking there has to be something here,” Nan Zhong said. “If you look at one case, you maybe can dismiss it as a random blip, but once you look at tons and tons of them the patterns start to emerge. That’s when we started to suspect racial discrimination.”
Zhong was granted admission to the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Maryland. He opted to enroll at UT Austin, but left after turning 18 and accepting a job offer at Google. Nan Zhong also works at Google, but is employed in a different department and said he had no role in his son’s hiring.
In the months after his son’s rejections, Nan Zhong reached out to the UC Board of Regents, elected officials and even Gov. Gavin Newsom, urging them to make the college admissions process more clear and alleging that Asian Americans are being held to a higher standard than other applicants.
Han Mi Yoon-Wu, associate vice provost and executive director of undergraduate admissions for the UC system, denied any form of discrimination in a letter to Nan Zhong in March 2024, saying that the UC system does not grant preferential treatment to any applicant on the basis of race, sex, color, ethnicity or national origin.
“Not only are Asian Americans well-represented at UC, the proportion of Asian Americans in the California admit pool has remained stable over the past several years. In fact, Asian Americans represented the highest proportion, almost 40 percent, of the University’s 2023 incoming California freshman class,” Yoon-Wu wrote.
While Nan Zhong sought out counsel from several law firms before filing his case, he was too met with rejections or no response. So, he filed the case himself with the help of ChatGPT and Gemini.
Heidi Reavis, managing partner at the law firm of Reavis Page Jump LLP, said the use of AI in drafting the legal filing will probably have no impact on the judge’s evaluation of the legal papers and arguments. Reavis said attorneys may have been hesitant to attach themselves to a case that could have such a lengthy and costly litigation process or the attorneys simply don’t agree with the Zhongs’ concerns about the admissions process.
“While Stanley Zhong’s underlying claims track his unfortunate admissions experience, the case is a cause. The Zhongs and their co-Plaintiff SWORD (Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination) are broadly challenging university admission systems that may have diversity goals with which many attorneys are sympathetic and indeed the beneficiaries,” Reavis said.
