Stanley Zhong’s lawsuit alleging race-based discrimination in admissions at the University of Washington has secured full pro bono representation from the Pacific Legal Foundation, a nonprofit public-interest law firm that defends individual rights against unlawful government action.
The case is one of four filed in 2025 by Stanley Zhong and Students Who Oppose Racial Discrimination (SWORD) against the University of California system, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, and Cornell University. The complaints allege that race-conscious policies and practices at these institutions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and 42 United States Code Section 1981 by imposing higher standards on Asian American applicants.
Stanley Zhong, a 2023 graduate of Henry M. Gunn High School in Palo Alto, earned a 4.42 weighted GPA (3.97 unweighted) and a 1590 SAT score. He excelled in competitive programming and founded a startup featured by Amazon Web Services. Google first took notice when he was 13; after high school it hired him for a software-engineering role typically requiring a Ph.D. or equivalent experience. Despite these credentials, he was rejected by 16 of the 18 colleges to which he applied, including five University of California campuses, the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, and Cornell. He was accepted only by the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Maryland but chose the Google position instead.
Stanley’s parents contacted admissions offices seeking explanations. After more than a year of delays, the schools reiterated that they do not use race-based admissions because such practices are illegal. Facing repeated rejections from law firms to take on their case, the family of engineers, with no legal training, turned to multiple AI tools to draft and refine their pleadings. According to Nan Zhong, Stanley’s father, the family has spent more than $200,000 out of pocket across the four cases.
In August 2026, U.S. District Judge James Robart partially denied the University of Washington’s motion to dismiss, allowing Stanley’s Title VI claim and certain damages and prospective-relief claims against university officials to proceed and clearing the way for discovery. The decision drew renewed attention and led the Pacific Legal Foundation to take on the University of Washington case free of charge in September 2026.
“Pacific Legal Foundation has long fought government policies that sort students by race,” Andrew Quinio, an attorney with Pacific Legal Foundation, said in a statement. “We’re proud to represent Stanley as he seeks equal treatment under the law and a fair chance for students to be evaluated as individuals.”
Because Zhong has not enrolled in college, his claim avoids the short statute-of-limitations windows that constrained many individual plaintiffs in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023). That case took a decade and relied on a continuously replenished roster of student plaintiffs. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately held that race-based admissions violate the Constitution.
Yet multiple institutions continue the practice, according to Department of Justice investigations. At UCLA’s medical school, internal documents and communications showed leadership promoting the idea that increasing racial diversity in the physician workforce is essential to prevent injury and death among Black and Hispanic patients, effectively framing continued race-based admissions as a matter of life and death, while admitting Black and Hispanic applicants with consistently lower academic qualifications than white and Asian counterparts.
Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Civil Rights Division has stated that “like many of its peer institutions, UCLA Law School runs a two-tiered admissions system whose academic bar for acceptance shifts up or down depending on the color of your skin.”
As of early October 2026, the Department of Justice has issued formal findings of race-based discrimination in admissions against at least eight professional schools (including UCLA’s medical and law schools, U.C. Berkeley Law, Duke Law, Yale School of Medicine, UC San Diego Medical and others) and has opened investigations into 15 additional medical schools for potential violations of the 2023 Supreme Court ruling.
The Zhong family is eagerly recruiting additional Asian American student plaintiffs for a quickly approaching Oct. 29 court date. Qualifying student plantiffs are those who have Asian heritage and plan to apply to any of the institutions named in the suits. Interested parents may submit information via this form.
Although the current actions focus on Asian American applicants, the underlying legal principles apply to any student disadvantaged by racial preferences in admissions. The family continues to seek tax-deductible donations through GoFundMe to cover expert and litigation costs for the remaining three cases.
