Stanley Zhong has an almost perfect SAT score of 4.42 grade point average, bespoke adults in competitive coding competitions, and launched his own digital signature service in high school.
When it was time to apply for university, Zhong’s family was not overly concerned about his outlook, even in an increasingly competitive entrance environment.
However, by the end of his fourth year at Palo Alto in 2023, Zhong had received letters of rejection to 16 of the 18 universities.
“I was surprised by surprise, surprised by surprise, and it turned into frustration and eventually became angry,” his father, Nan Chang, told The Times in a recent interview. “And I think Stanley and I felt the same way. I think something is really funky.”
Less than a year later, as a freshman in Texas, Zhong was hired by Google and adopted a software engineering position that normally requires a high degree. Now he and his father are suing some of the universities that rejected him.
Zhong, 19, and his father, Nan Zhong, have filed a series of lawsuits alleging that universities, including those in the University of California System, are engaged in “racist admission practices that dislike high-quality Asian American applicants.” The latest lawsuit was filed against Cornell University last week.
Stanley Chang refused the request for interview time through his father.
Race considerations in university admissions have been a heated debate in the United States for decades, and have been increasing since 2023 when the Supreme Court abolished a policy of positive action at universities that used race as a factor in determining who is recognized. The ruling dates back to 1978, condemning an earlier court decision that found that the university had a compelling interest in seeking racial diversity on campus and could be viewed as a positive factor in selecting black and Latino students among eligible applicants.
Proponents of positive behavior argue that it will help level the playing field for underprivileged groups and create more diverse student bodies. But those who disagree with that say the idea undermines the merit-based selection process and discriminates against qualified applicants.
In California, the University of California and California State University systems have long been banned from using race as an admissions factor.
“We believe this is a valueless litigation that aims to divert us from our mission to provide world-class education to University of California students,” a spokesperson for the University of California wrote in a statement to the Times. “Since California banned the racial consideration of attendees in 1996, the University of California has adjusted its admission practices to comply with the law. We support admission policies and records of expanding access to all qualified students.”
According to a UC spokesman, UC applications collect information about the race and ethnicity of students, but are not used only for data collection or shared or considered with application reviewers during the admissions process.
Asian Americans had long had the highest enrollment rates among first-year Californians compared to other racial and ethnic groups. UC’s fall 2024 registration data released in January showed that Asian Americans constitute the largest undergraduate group with 36.3%.
However, Nan Chang argues in the lawsuit that the majority of registered Asian Americans have not proven that the university is not using discriminatory practices. He cited a 2020 California State Auditor report that found that the University of California campus did not properly train or supervise readers assessing applications, and found that ratings could create a risk of “unfair or conflicting.”
“The campus has not taken any important steps to protect applicants from reader bias,” the report said. “They provided applicants with demographic information such as their name, native language and birthplace that could bias their readers’ ratings.”
A Cornell spokesman declined to comment on the lawsuit.
The U.S. Department of Justice said last week it would investigate four universities: UCLA, UC, UC Irvine, Stanford University, and Berkeley, California.
Atty. General Pam Bondy said in a statement that she and President Trump are “focused on ending illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunities across the country.”
The university entrance process has long been shrouded in mystery. This can contribute to concerns that some students are bound to a higher standard than others for reasons other than grades or test scores, experts say. Entry to highly sought-after majors such as computer science makes it even more competitive, especially in the UC system, with limited space and surge in demand.
“In the case of UCS, getting rejection requires a small weakness,” said Jeffrey Hague, a college admissions consultant in Orange County.
The university is not permitted to look at race, but you can see the student’s background, life experiences and challenges.
According to his father, Zhong’s aptitude for programming was apparent in his early teens. He won second place in the high school division of MIT Battlecode and advanced to the global coding competition, Google Code Jam Coding Contest Semifinal.
In 2019, when he was 13 years old, Zhong was approached by a Google recruiter to discuss the company’s software engineering position. Given his age, the company was unable to advance his full-time position, but recruiters offered to save his resume for future follow-ups.
In 2021, Zhong launched Rabbitsign. Rabbitsign is an unlimited free e-Singers service that comes from Stanley’s desire to provide a cost-effective alternative to other paid signature services when demand surges during the pandemic.
“These things will be difficult for experts to achieve,” Nan Zong said. “And we thought for him, with that kind of qualification, that undergraduate computer science programs should be pretty reasonable for him to enter. But unfortunately, it turns out that this is not the case at all.”
Zhong has applied for the Computer Science program 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 universities, including MIT, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, Cornell, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, University of Wisconsin, University of Washington, California.
After the rejection began to roll, Nan Cheong tried to understand what was wrong. Has his son answered the question of personal insight in a strange way? Was there any obvious issues with his essay? The university counselors investigated his application and were unable to find anything that described the phenomenon, Nan Dzong said.
He also began to hear stories from their children’s Asian American families being denied admission, despite having what they thought was a solid application.
“When the data started to accumulate, I began to think there must be something here,” Nan Zong said. “If you look at one case, you can dismiss it as a random blip, but when you see those tons and tons, the patterns start to appear, and that’s when you start to suspect racism.”
Zhong was granted admission to the University of Texas and the University of Maryland in Austin. He chose to sign up for UT Austin, but turned 18 and left after accepting a job offer on Google. Nan Zhong also works for Google, but has been employed in another department and said he has no role in hiring his son.
A few months after her son’s rejection, Nan Zong contacted the UC Regent Committee, elected officials, and even Gavin Newsom, urging him to make the university entrance process clearer, claiming that Asian Americans were being held to a higher standard than other applicants.
Hanmi Yongwo, Associate Vice-Chancellor and Executive Director of UC Systems’ Undergraduate Enrollment, in a letter to Nancheong in March 2024, said that the UC system would not allow priority treatment based on race, gender, color, ethnicity or national origin.
“As well as Asian Americans are represented by UC, we acknowledge that the proportion of Asian Americans in California remains stable over the past few years. In fact, Asian Americans accounted for almost 40% of the university’s 2023 California freshman class,” wrote Yoon-Wu.
Nan Zhong had been looking for lawyers from several law firms before filing his case, but he also encountered a rejection or was not responded. So, with the help of Chatgpt and Gemini, he submitted the case himself.
Heidi Reavis, managing partner at the law firm of Reavis Page Jump LLP, said the use of AI in drafting legal applications would not affect the judge’s evaluation of legal papers and discussions. Reavis said the lawyers may have been hesitant to stick to cases that could have such a long and costly litigation process, or that the lawyers disagree with Zhongs’ concerns about the hospitalization process.
“Stanley Zon’s underlying claims track his unfortunate admission experience, but the incident is the cause. Zons and their co-commanders (students against racism) are widely challenging the university admissions system where many lawyers are sympathetic and have diversity goals that are actually beneficiaries.
Source link
