High School Graduate Recruited by Google After Being Rejected by 16 US Colleges
Stanley Zhong, an 18-year-old teenager from Palo Alto, USA, graduated from Gunn High School this year. He was a student rejected by 16 out of 18 colleges but ended up being recruited by Google.
Zhong graduated from Gunn High School this year with a weighted GPA of 4.42 and a score of 1590 out of 1600 on the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT). Reporting from ABC7, Zhong has even founded a startup called RabbitSign, which is engaged in electronics.
But from all of Zhong's abilities, he was not accepted by 16 colleges out of 18 colleges of his choice.
"Well, some of them of course I really hoped for. You know like Stanford and MIT, that's the reality, right? I thought I had a good chance at some public schools, but it turns out I only had a little chance and I couldn't get in," Zhong told ABC7.
The 16 campuses that rejected Zhong include Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie Mellon, Stanford, UC Berkeley, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), University of California, San Diego (UCSD), University of California Santa Barbara (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, Madison.
The remaining 2 campuses that accepted Zhong are the University of Texas and the University of Maryland.
After Zhong received 16 rejections from colleges, he was offered a job as a software engineer by the world's leading technology company, Google, and started work this week.
Zhong's father, Nan Zhong, also made a statement regarding Zhong's story. Nan Zhong is a software engineering manager at Google. He has taught coding to Zhong since a young age.
Nan Zhong shared her son's story in chat groups and parent blogs. His story went viral amidst the national conversation about elite college admissions.
On September 28, 2023, Zhong's story was raised by a witness testifying at a House Education and Labor Committee hearing.
The hearing aimed to consider this summer's Supreme Court decision banning affirmative action in college admissions and affecting university policies.
It was this policy that confused Zhong and his father. Zhong admits that admissions to elite colleges are complicated, and the number of applicants for computer science majors is very competitive.
College admissions experts tell us that even though colleges like MIT and Stanford have an acceptance rate below 5%, almost anyone can reach them.
In fact, Cal Poly San Luis Obispo College, which has the middle 50% GPA of 4.13-4.25 as a requirement, could not get Zhong admitted as an engineering student.
Zhong's story has sparked conversations about how the college admissions system in the US should be more transparent.
