Easier to pay off the class action lawsuit then let a court open up all their private admission process in discovery... Again you let your bias lead the facts... Yale did not lose any lawsuit. Yale agreed to settle the case nearly a year ago and is no longer a defendant," a Yale spokesperson said in a statement to CT Insider Thursday. "The $18.5 million settlement contains no admission that Yale did anything wrong."
Legacy admissions are not illegal by the way...there is no law that makes it so. People cry over it because it rewards rich families and alumni who donated money to the school... People who donate.money to trump and Biden got jobs in the administration...why is that ok? should all qualified people.sue? Legacy lawsuits simply come from whiny witches because there is no requirement of cause to sue..lawyers chase.money.
3.97 GPA,not 4.4 https://www.sacbee.com/news/california/article300681074.html He graduated from Henry M. Gunn High School as an accomplished student, with a 3.97 GPA, according to the lawsuit and his father.
Zhong went to Gunn High School, an affluent top-performing school in Palo Alto, which is filled with high achieving kids, many of them will follow their parents's footsteps into tech jobs, and they're all vying for spots at many of the same top schools. Such high achieving classmates put Zhong about top 9% in a class of 485, and his high SAT score was likely not singular at Gunn, which means there might had been as many as 40 people at his high school with better academic numbers than him vying for spots at the same schools he was shooting for. High selective colleges in general, and highly competitive programs like computer science, don't want to have a bunch of kids from one particular high school in their freshman classes. So realistically there may have been one or two opportunities for Gunn Class of '23 grads who wanted to major in computer science at any one of the schools Zhong applied to, and there were other Gunn graduates more competitive than him. Much has been made of young Stanley Zhong's big differentiator of founding a startup, how amazing it is for a teenager to do that. Stanley's father, Nan Zhong, is a Software Engineering Manager at Google. Previously he co-founded two startups, created the #1 ranked communication app on Android (featured by Fortune and Amazing Android Apps for Dummies), and raised $10M in venture funding. Before that, he led the team that built AWS's Elastic Load Balancing service. The Varsity Blues admissions scandal looms large in the minds of admissions officers at highly selective schools. If I were an admissions counselor with Zhong's application in front of me, the startup founder claim would pop, and a healthy skepticism of such a remarkable claim would have me doing some googling where I would find his father's profile, and immediately be suspicious about how much this startup was actually Stanley's doing vs his father's, to be honest.
Part of the issue, that doesn’t get pointed out enough, is that university Computer Science programs tend to be pretty small. At the UCs they are roughly 3-4% of the student body. That’s around 300 kids per class. Add up the 6 CA schools Zhong applied to and that’s 1800 slots total. This is radically disproportionate to the number of CA kids who are applying to Computer Science from competitive high schools every year. For reference, CA high schools will graduate 500,000 kids in 2024. Let’s look at UC Davis, the lowest ranked UC Zhong applied to, that he probably (perhaps foolishly) considered a safety. In 2022 Davis accepted 98 kids from Gunn High School. Statistically 3% of these admits for Computer Science. That’s 3 kids. Who here actually thinks that there weren’t 3 kids at Gunn with GPAs higher than Zhong’s, who applied to CS at Davis? Im guessing there were at least 10 kids at Gunn with GPAs better than him. Let’s assume Zhong’s GPA was high enough to keep him in the running, already a long shot due to the above. His ECs, while indicating some very impressive CS potential, are very one dimensional. And your average UC admissions officer is not a professional software engineer by day and probably wouldn’t be as impressed by his competitions as they would by, let’s say, a 4.0 student who was captain of the water polo team. Perhaps that’s a shame but let’s be real. Zhong’s ECs also didn’t do anything to make him likable. No leadership, no community service, etc. Finally, on the likability point. The kid seems remarkably tone deaf. He applies to 16 schools, none of them safeties. He gets into 2 great schools and ends up rejecting them both for a terrific job that his father helped him to get. Then he and his Google daddy decide to spend their time going on the news to complain that he didn’t get into more schools. I don’t begrudge the kid at all for using his connections, which was smart of him. But his drawing attention to it on this grievance campaign is just not a good look at all. He’s clearly talented, but also comes across as both privileged and self absorbed, and this probably came across in his recommendation letters and maybe even his essays. At the end of the day, he didn’t need the colleges anyway. Good for him. And hopefully the colleges used his slot on other kids who were a better mutual fit. Good for them too.
I think people in the bay area and this sub are very very bad at identifying the traits that colleges look for when students are applying. One of the top comments mentions that he has a 3.97 instead of a 4.0 which hurt him. When in reality, schools are looking for well-rounded candidates and this person is not one of them. Honestly, who cares about grades and tests scores, schools want individuals with unique and interesting backgrounds, or are talented at hobbies, while also showing that they are an above average student and aptitude. People play grades/scores like the end all be all, when in reality, the opposite is
No one with lower test scores who prioritizes victimhood over hard work and discipline should ever get rewarded.
You really need to learn the difference between weighted and unweighted GPA. Both his weighted and unweighted GPAs were smack in the middle of the admissions range of most of the top U of C schools. For a couple of the schools, his GPA was well in excess of the typical GPA. Yet still he was denied admission.
A lot of this gets back to the intent of the lawsuits. The lawsuit regarding legacy admission was a cash grab. The lawyers and their plaintiffs were focused on taking money from the universities. It is much easier for the universities to settle, pay some money, not admit guilt (which would be used against them in future suits) and not have to provide discovery material regarding the admissions (which would only serve to prove they are guilty). Similarly a number of the individual suits regarding DEI admissions were cash grabs. As I pointed out earlier these suits were settled with a non-disclosure agreement, no admission of guilt, no transfer of admission discovery materials, and some type of cash settlement (that was much less than the hundreds of millions demanded). However the DEI lawsuit against UNC and Harvard was done on ethical grounds rather than demanding large sums of money. The Students for Fair Admission demanded changes in the admissions process at universities to exclude DEI. The Supreme Court ruling put these changes into place. Similarly the lawsuit from SWORD (Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination) appears to be focused on demanding changes in the U of C admissions process to demand they comply with state law and not use race as a factor in admissions. The suit has now grown to include over 20 plaintiffs according to one report, so this is not only about Stanley Zhong. He is just the most famous of the plaintiffs.