Following the discussion from Is the college admissions process broken?, could everyone comment on Stanley’s case?
When Stanley Zhong, who graduated from Gunn High School in Palo Alto, California, in 2023, was rejected by 14 of the 18 colleges and universities to which he applied, he and his advisers were dumbfounded.
A total of four schools offered admission to Zhong, including the University of Texas at Austin.
Not one to wallow in disappointment, Zhong decided to matriculate at UT Austin. He also applied to a software engineer opening at Google “as a moonshot,” he said.
Not sure why this is a story. Zhong accepted to an excellent school, but decided to take a job he was offered at Google instead. Admissions not broken as far as I can see via this story.
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I guess Google needed to replace the 12,000 people it laid off.
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“But he did not expect the rejection letters he received from some of the state schools he had applied to, including University of California, Davis; University of California, Santa Barbara; and California Polytechnic State University.”
Given his stats and ECs, to me this indicates some HUGE red flag in his application. Was it something he wrote about in his PIQs/essays? Was there something else they haven’t mentioned here?
In reality, there is NO WAY for us to know what happened without actually seeing his entire application. Could be all kinds of things. I mean, we don’t even know what classes his took - maybe he math’ed up, but never took more than the bare minimum of foreign language or English or whatever. We are missing a ton of info here. Just because mommy and daddy think he’s their special snowflake (and he has some practical, employable skills and, heck, for all we know his uncle does the hiring there), doesn’t mean he had a solid application.
I really hate these kinds of stories. Everyone gets all riled up without realizing they are missing a ton of facts.
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If anything, I would say that the story illustrates that global coding contests and founding a tech startup aren’t seen as particularly impressive ECs, at least in the bay area.
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This is actually not surprising at all if he applied as a Computer Science major. He only lists a few of his 14 rejections, and of course Stanford is no surprise, but UCD, UCSB, and Cal Poly SLO are all tough admits for Comp Sci, even for very high stats.
There just aren’t enough slots for this very high demand major. And Gunn H.S., usually ranked in the top 10 or even top 5 within California, is full of very high stats students who have started companies, etc. So within-HS competition may have some effect on chances.
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True, but even still, Davis should have been in the bag - that’s why I wonder about PIQs and course selection. Something seems very off to me.
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I know multiple high stats students who did not get admitted to Davis for Comp Sci.
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He probably applied to CS at all of these schools, which is a tough admit at all of them. It seems to me that he didn’t have very good advising. A better advisor would have explained the low admission rate for CS at these schools. He clearly saw them as “state schools” that should be an easy admit.
“No one can say they expect to get into Stanford, Berkeley or MIT, but I applied to a few state schools where I thought I had a better chance,” Zhong told CBS MoneyWatch.
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If he really wants the whole story to come out, instead of sharing his stats and EC, he should publish his essays.
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Ah yes, my mistake, CS…Yes, that makes it much more difficult and even his high stats may not have stood enough in that competitive field.
@Gumbymom probably has the stats handy, but off the top of my head, recent CS admit rates have been:
Cal Poly SLO <10%
UCD <20%
UCSB ?
I agree that his PIQs may not have helped him at the UCs either.
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It seems every application cycle we can expect two kinds of stories to come out:
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The kid with a high GPA and SAT who gets rejected by schools he expected to get into (remember this one, for example: https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-get-into-the-ivy-league-extraordinary-isnt-always-enough-these-days-11650546000 )
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The (usually URM) student who gets accepted to 100 colleges and earns “over $1 million in scholarships.”
In both cases, everyone gets either angry or excited or both, without thinking critically about the information being presented and not being presented.
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Looking more closely at the story, I think it is strange that it is apparently being held up as an example of race-based admissions bias. I am wondering if his parents feel that the rejections from UC Davis, UCSB, and Cal Poly were race-based, or if they are referring to other universities that rejected him?
Zhong and his family reached out to the Asian American Coalition for Education (AACE), a nonprofit organization that advocates for Asian-American children’s education rights, “to try to push for transparency in college admissions decisions,” he said.
AACE founding president Yukong Mike Zhao raised Zhong’s case at a hearing of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce on race-based college admissions decisions last month.
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Well, we can’t pursue that discussion (race-based admission) on this thread.
But I also found myself wondering how many waitlist spots he was offered. I know the general thought is that waitlists are a soft rejection, but in this kind of case, I think it is a reflection of the impaction of CS majors at all schools. In other words, a waitlist spot recognizes his strong stats, versus a rejection.
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I re-read the WSJ story and it was pretty apparent why the student (a girl) got so many rejections - she wrote about her history of anxiety/depression in her essay to explain two “B” grades she received as a sophomore in HS. That’s a red flag for colleges these days. Also, she came from a school with little history of sending kids to Ivy League schools (only 3 in a decade) which means it was going to be long odds.
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Agree.
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Yes, that is the speculation I have read about the situation as well.
And that is why I also wonder what the kid in the story linked here may have written about in his PIQs/essays or what other potential red flags might have been in his application that we don’t know about. I mean, maybe that’s not the case at all, but the thing is we just don’t know what happened and can’t even really speculate without seeing the full application. We are missing too much information.
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For the UCs, I agree with you about the waitlists being an important part of the admissions process, especially for highly impacted majors like engineering and CS. In my S23’s social circle there were many high stat kids applying for these majors, and many were waitlisted, but subsequently there was a lot of movement off the wait lists; S23 is now attending a UC where he was initially waitlisted.
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She felt the need to explain two B grades? Really? I can’t read the WSJ article. It’s behind a paywall.
I have to say…this student in the more recent article will likely land on his feet.