High school graduate hired by Google but rejected by colleges

The recent Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action intensified the debate on college admission fairness. Here is an interesting and concrete data point that hopefully can bring more substance and rationality to the debate about college admission fairness.

Stanley Zhong graduated from high school in June 2023. Starting in 2020, he built an e-signing startup (details below) that is featured in an Amazon Web Services (AWS) case study. That led to multiple companies interviewing him for full-time jobs despite the slow IT job market. Shortly after he turned 18, in September 2023, Google hired him as an L4 software engineer, a position that typically requires either a Ph.D degree in computer science or multiple years of professional experience plus a Bachelor/Master’s degree. (It also helped that Google actually invited him to a full-time interview in 2019 without knowing he was only 13 then.)

In contrast, his college application results were underwhelming. He applied to the Computer Science programs. All but two colleges (listed below) rejected his application.

• UC Berkeley
• UC LA
• UC San Diego
• UC Santa Barbara
• UC Davis
• California Polytechnic State University
• Univ of Wisconsin
• Univ of Washington
• Univ of Illinois
• Univ of Michigan
• Georgia Tech
• Cal Tech
• Cornell University
• MIT
• CMU
• Stanford

Only Univ of Texas and Univ of Maryland accepted his application.

Here are some highlights of his application.

• Advanced to the Google Code Jam Coding Contest semi-final.
• Won 2nd place in MIT Battlecode's global high school division.
• Won 6th place in Stanford ProCo
• Advanced to the USA Computing Olympiad Platinum Division
• Created an e-signing startup (RabbitSign.com) that has grown to tens of thousands of users organically.

• An AWS Well-Architected Review concluded that it "is one of the most efficient and secure accounts" they have reviewed.
• AWS is publishing a case study featuring RabbitSign for its exemplary use of AWS Serverless and compliance services.
• Designed, implemented and operated the web frontend, RESTful APIs, workflow orchestration, metrics and alerting, horizontal scaling, CDN, rate limiting, security hardening (including intrusion detection and DDoS protection), compliance monitoring, internationalization, and disaster recovery.
• Passed multi-week whitebox pentest with no major security issues discovered.
• Wrote comprehensive unit tests, continuous API Postman tests, and end-to-end Selenium tests.
• Negotiated a 90% discount (worth $40K+) for compliance audits. After working with the auditors over several quarters, RabbitSign is now the world's only provider of unlimited free SOC 2-, ISO 27001- and HIPAA-compliant e-signing.
• Interviewed by Viewpoint with Dennis Quaid, a series of short documentaries on innovations aired on CNBC, Fox Business, Bloomberg, and public TV stations across the US (e.g. KQED in the Bay Area). Their past guests included President George H.W. Bush, Secretary Colin Powell, and Fortune 500 CEOs.

• Co-founded a non-profit that brings free coding lessons to kids in underserved communities. Over 2 years, it taught 500+ kids in California, Washington and Texas.
• Won President’s Volunteer Service Award (Gold Level)
• National Merit Scholarship finalist
• SAT: 1590
• GPA (UW/W): 3.97/4.42
• Served as the founding officer and president of the competitive programming club at his high school
• His personal statement (essay) was pretty much captured in the Viewpoint interview. It was about why Stanley created RabbitSign, how he struggled with rejections but eventually found a partner to enable the free HIPAA-compliant e-signing that can help lower America's healthcare cost, and how RabbitSign is the first Activism Corporation designed to counter corporate greed in favor of social good.

Apparently, his profile above was enough to interest Google to interview and hire him, but failed to convince most college admission offices. One can speculate the reasons:

• This case may be a random outlier. However, given the number of rejections, this seems unlikely.
• Maybe college admission is indeed harder than getting hired by Google, at least for some applicants. Because UC doesn’t consider race in its admission, Affirmative Action can’t be the reason for the rejections by multiple UC schools either.

After Stanlely’s story was shared in a local parents group, the public’s reaction was overwhelming.

• The story went viral, spreading coast-to-coast in a day.
• It’s reported by ABC, CBS, CNBC, USA Today, and other media channels. Elon Musk also commented on it twice.
• Multiple congressional candidates, both Democrats and Republicans, have reached out to me to express support.
• Numerous parents/students came forward and complained about similarly absurd UC admission results.

As a California taxpayer, I was rattled by the fact that Stanley had no UC school as options. Coupled with the Varsity Blues scandal and the 2020 State Auditor report on UC admission, we have compelling reasons to demand more transparency in UC adimssion. As a basic democratic principle, we should have checks and balances for every power, including the power of the admission offices. Holistic reviews should not be construed as black box reviews. I think college admission transparency is not a blue/red issue. It’s a common sense issue about our kids’ education and their mental health. It’s a common sense issue about America's competitiveness in the global economy.

If you live in California, please contact California lawmakers and Governor Newsom by following the steps at https://www.admissiontransparency.org. Four California lawmakers have responded and expressed support. Their responses described Stanley’s case as “alarming” and “extremely disturbing”. But we need to raise awareness and spark conversations with more state lawmakers and Governor Newsom. It won't matter for Stanley anymore since he is having a blast at Google. But other kids, your kids, your grandkids and your wallet may thank you one day for the action you take today.

Best,

Nan Zhong

nanzhong1@gmail.com

(Stanley’s dad)