01/28/2026
https://nypost.com/2025/03/03/us-news/stanley-zhong-had-a-4-4-gpa-but-got-rejected-by-16-colleges-now-hes-suing/. Stanley Zhong was a near-perfect college applicant.
Out of the more than 2 million kids who take the SAT annually, he’s one of roughly 2,000 to score a 1590 or higher.
His high school GPA was a 4.42 on a 4.0 scale. He even had an offer in hand to work a PhD-level job at Google before graduating high school.
Stanley, who intended to study computer science, also managed his own startup, e-document signature platform Rabbit-Sign, while still a high schooler.
By anyone’s expectations, the Palo Alto, Calif., teen should have been Harvard- or MIT-bound. Yet Stanley, now 19, was met with disappointment after disappointment in 2023 when college admissions letters started trickling in.
Stanley was rejected by Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell University, Georgia Tech, MIT, Stanford, UC Berkeley, UC Davis, UCLA, UCSD, UCSB, the University of Illinois, the University of Michigan, the University of Washington and the University of Wisconsin.
Only the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Maryland — with respective 31% and 44% admissions rates — accepted him. Stanley’s father, Nan Zhong, was astounded.
Stanley Zhong was a near perfect college applicant. Then almost every college rejected him.