Despite a 4.2 high school grade-point average, near-perfect SATs, and the fact that he founded a software company while still a high school sophomore, Stanley Zhong was rejected by admissions officers at UC Berkeley, UCLA, Davis, San Diego and Santa Barbara – every University of California campus he applied to. Just 18 at the time, the Palo Alto, California, native shook off the disappointment and immediately earned a prestigious job as a Google programmer. A year later, he hasn’t given up on his dream: he’d still like to go back to school and eventually earn a doctorate in computer science.
To level the path to admissions, he’s suing the University of California system because, he says, race factored into his UC rejections.
Citing violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and the California constitution, Zhong’s federal suit claims the UC system intentionally discriminates against Asian-American students in order to achieve racial quotas in undergraduate and graduate admissions.
And while asserting financial loss, emotional distress and reputational damage, he’s not even asking for money (beyond costs) in the suit – just that the UC system follow the law.
“We want to open up the whole secret box of what they are doing,” said Nan Zhong, Stanley’s father and president of the group Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination (SWORD) that filed the suit and a similar action in Washington state. “They know exactly what they are doing.”
The Zhang’s filed their federal lawsuit in California’s Eastern District – and they’re representing themselves.
“The reason we’re representing ourselves is not that we’d like to,” Nan told the New York Post. “Lawyers leaning left didn’t want to take the case. And then the lawyers on the right side think that the courts in California [and other states] are going to be too biased.”
University of California officials said they hadn’t seen the suit. That didn’t stop them from calling it “meritless” and designed “to distract us from our mission to provide California students with a world class education.”
“Since the consideration of race in admissions was banned in California in 1996, the University of California has adjusted its admissions practices to comply with the law,” the officials said. “We stand by our admission policies and our record of expanding access for all qualified students.”
That’s been the university’s position since 1996, when California voters overwhelmingly approved Prop. 209, a state ballot initiative banning racial preferences in all government functions.
But Zhong’s suit illustrates what many have long understood: state university officials have circumvented Prop 209 with workarounds that allow university officials wide discretion in admissions. California’s high schools even got in on the game: they responded to declining literacy and math skills by simply lowering graduation standards. In 2021, with high school graduation rates rising and their test scores falling, the University of California system bowed to political pressure and scrapped the SAT and ACT for all applicants.
“The settlement resolves a 2019 lawsuit brought by a coalition of students, advocacy groups and the Compton Unified School District, a largely Black and Hispanic district in Los Angeles County,” the New York Times observed. “The plaintiffs said that the college entrance tests are biased against poor and mainly Black and Hispanic students — and that by basing admissions decisions on those tests, the system illegally discriminates against applicants on the basis of their race, wealth and disability.” A few months later, in early 2022, the state’s separate California State University system followed suit.
But eliminating the SAT and ACT tests merely masks the state’s K–12 failure. Predictably, when students graduating from lousy high schools enter the state’s universities, they struggle or even drop out. They’re demoralized, and, when they leave, they’re poorer, too, thanks in part to student debt.
California’s political establishment responds to this scandal not with a return to academic rigor but with claims of systemic racism — most famously, per the state’s Reparations Task Force, time-traveling back to the 19th century where it finds an imagined slave history in the state that explains the origins of California’s educational crisis among Black children.
Following the Supreme Court’s decision 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions v Harvard, UC officials openly bragged about workarounds they believe are legal. They’ve even offered guidance to colleges and universities in other states hoping to circumvent the Harvard decision.
“What colleges and universities will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is finding ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution,” said Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of Berkeley’s law school, shortly after the Harvard decision. “So, they can’t have any explicit use of race. They have to make sure that their admissions statistics don’t reveal any use of race. But they can use proxies for race.”
The proxies are many and often surreptitious. For example, if a school – including nearly the entirety of the UC and the California State University systems – calls itself a “minority-serving institution,” it may be able to justify race-based admissions quotas. It may use zip codes to help identify “disadvantaged” students in underperforming school districts. And it can certainly use what the state calls “holistic review” – personal essays that explore the racism or sexism the student has had to overcome.
California may have an unusual ally in defending itself against Zhong’s charges. Writing for the Court in Harvard, Chief Justice John Roberts called holistic review acceptable: “Nothing in this opinion should be construed as prohibiting universities from considering an applicant’s discussion of how race affected his or her life, be it through discrimination, inspiration or otherwise.”
Stanley declined to personally comment for this story. His father told us, “Due to the open hostility against Asian-American students standing up for their rights in college admissions, Stanley is not taking media interviews in connection with the lawsuits.”
He added, “Sorry about that.” Aren’t we all?
Thomas Buckley is a senior fellow at California Policy Center. If you know someone who may have been denied admission to a University of California undergraduate or graduate program on the basis of race or ethnicity, please contact uclaAdmissions@calpolicycenter.org.
