College admissions decisions disappoint thousands of high-achieving students each year, but one Northern California teen’s story is catching the attention of Congress.
Stanley Zhong, 18, is a 2023 graduate of Gunn High School in Palo Alto.
Despite earning 3.97 unweighted and 4.42 weighted GPA, scoring 1590 out of 1600 on the SATs and launching his own e-signing startup RabbitSign in sophomore year, he was rejected by 16 out of the 18 colleges he applied to.
But Zhong was recently hired by Google. He just started his new job this week.
“Oh, well, some of them were certainly expected. You know, Stanford, MIT, you know, it’s, it is what it is, right?…Some of the state schools I really thought, you know, I had a good chance and turns out a bit of a chance I had, I didn’t get in.”
But shortly after the wave of rejections, he was offered a full-time software engineering role by Google, one of the world’s top tech companies.
On Sept. 28, Zhong’s story was brought up by a witness testifying at the House Committee on Education and the Workforce hearing. The goal of the hearing was to consider how this summer’s Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions is shaping university policies, policies that Zhong and his father confounded him.
Although Zhong recognizes that elite college admissions is complicated and his pool of Silicon Valley computer science major applicants is highly competitive, he admits to being surprised.
He was denied by: MIT, Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, UC Davis, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Cornell University, University of Illinois, University of Michigan, Georgia Tech, Caltech, University of Washington and University of Wisconsin.
End of Affirmative Action? The Supreme Court Takes on Landmark College Admissions Cases
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