Low Bar

How this story unfolds will be interesting to watch. Apparently, a lawsuit was filed by Nan Zhong and his son, Stanley Zhong, a Palo Alto teen who was rejected by 16 top colleges, including MIT, Stanford, and multiple University of California campuses, despite having a 4.42 GPA, a near-perfect SAT score, and founding a startup. Stanley’s story, and his subsequent hiring by Google as a software engineer, became a focal point in the national debate over college admissions. He seems to have most of the checklist completed except he did not end poverty in Sub-Saharan Africa and/or find a cure for cancer. Just those two things could have put him above the line. The level of ridiculousness in the process has well exceed the bar though. 

If this kid makes over three hundred thousand (give or take) without having had to step into college, it begs the question what purpose would college serve anyway if the only intent was to land the job similar to the one he already has. Most of what he learned in college would prove irrelevant anyway. I have an intern right now who is graduating from one of the colleges that rejected Stanley Zhong. He is bright and well-intentioned but he is hardly performing at a level that inspires any awe. He was given a pretty well-defined problem to solve and he decided in a couple of weeks he would not be able to get it over the finish line and have something good to show at his end of internship demo. So he will do what is possible to demo well. Not the outcome I was expecting but that's how it turned out.

I have also had interns in prior years that came from colleges way down in the pecking order that would have done just as well and kids from community colleges that would have gone above and beyond to solve the problem because they are motivated to prove their value. Based on personal experience, I am more inclined to pick my interns from unknown, unremarkable colleges if they have the burning desire to excel and can show me evidence of it.