Rejected by 16 US colleges despite Google job offer teen sues university

A teenage tech genius, who was offered a job at Google when he was still in high school, and his father are taking legal action against 16 US universities alleging he was discriminated against as an Asian-American when a slew of top schools rejected his application in 2023.

Stanley Zhong, now 19, and his father, Nan Zhong, filed a lawsuit against the University of California system with SWORD (Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination) - a group consisting of other students who believe Asian-Americans are discriminated against in the college admission process. In the 291-page lawsuit, the father-son duo claimed that Stanley was offered a PhD level job at Google as a software engineer despite being rejected by multiple top universities in the US, The Daily Mail reported.

The Zhongs are seeking compensatory and punitive damages and "such other and further relief" as the court deems proper.

Stanley had outstanding grades - a 3.97 GPA and a 4.42 weighted GPA. He was also one of around 2,000 students in high school to have scored 1590 or higher on the SAT, of more than 2 million students who take the test every year, The New York Post reported.

Initially, what appeared to be a one-off case, became a normalcy after rejections started rolling in one after the other. "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," Stanley's father, Nan Zhong, told The Post.

The teenager was only accepted by the University of Texas in Austin and the University of Maryland. He was rejected by Caltech, Cornell University, MIT, Stanford, UCLA, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, and UC Berkeley, among others.

"What started with surprise turned into frustration and then finally it turned into anger," Nan Zhong explained.

His son intended to study Computer Science, and even managed his own startup while still in high school.

Nan Zhong, an immigrant from China who also works as a software engineer, is pursuing the case without any legal representation because various law firms rejected to take up the matter. He used artificial intelligence to help outline the complaints and credited the technology for drafting the lawsuits.

The US Supreme Court in 2023 outlawed affirmative action in college admissions, which means it's unconstitutional for a university to consider an applicant's race. However, Nan Zhong has decided to sue universities in states that rejected his son that had pre-existing laws banning racial discrimination in admissions.

"There's nothing more un-American than this... I don't really think [these schools] give a damn about the damage they're doing to these kids," Nan Zhong told The Post.

Affirmative action in college admissions has been banned at public universities in California since 1996, The New York Post reported.

So far, the Zhongs have filed lawsuits against the University of California system and the University of Washington. A lawsuit against the University of Michigan is under process, according to The Post.

Stanley, meanwhile, took up the Google job offer and has been working at the tech giant since October. He was first offered the job when he was 13, thanks to his stellar coding skills, which made Google think he must be an adult.

Nan Zhong told The Post that he is "very much worried" about the college prospects of his other son, who is 16.

"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," he told The Post.