Here's the setup: Stanley Zhong, now 21, was rejected by 16 of 18 colleges he applied to back in 2022. His father believes the rejections were racially motivated and has spent the last two-and-a-half years building a legal crusade, reportedly using AI to draft filings after every law firm he approached declined to take the case. Meanwhile, Stanley skipped college entirely and landed an engineering job at Google, where he reportedly earned an "outstanding impact" performance rating in 2025 — higher than the majority of his peers.

Let that sink in. The kid bypassed the entire higher education industrial complex and ended up exactly where Stanford CS grads dream of landing. As one Bay Area resident put it: "I went to Stanford, and a job at a place like Google would've been the end goal for any CS grad. Stanley already has that — do the college rejections even matter anymore, except for hurting his tiger parent's ego?"