Zach Yadegari knew a post on X about his college admissions experience would go viral. But he didn’t expect it to go this viral.
On Monday night, the 18-year-old entrepreneur announced on social media that despite his 4.0 grade-point average, despite his 34 ACT score and despite co-founding a multimillion-dollar app, he had been rejected by nearly every school he applied to.
Harvard University, Stanford University, Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, Brown University and the University of Pennsylvania were among the 15 schools that Yadegari says turned him down. According to the post, he did receive some acceptance letters, including from Georgia Tech, one of the premier engineering schools in the country.
Even so, the post has become a lightning rod for controversy. Yadegari and others have called it an indictment on the U.S. college admissions system, claiming that his stated rejection from every Ivy League university is evidence that colleges “prioritize diversity over merit.” Others online have critiqued his credentials and the admissions essay he posted online.
“I am getting a crazy amount of hate right now on Twitter,” Yadegari said in a 14-minute video he uploaded to YouTube on Wednesday evening. “Everyone is scrutinizing and ripping apart my (admissions) essay to complete shreds.”
According to his video, he expected the Twitter post would get 1 million views. As of Thursday afternoon, it’s been viewed 26 million times. Yadegari did not respond to requests for comment, but he apparently took measures to help the post get traction. He said in the video, for instance, that he didn’t include that he was also accepted by Emory University, “because I wanted to make it look worse than it was to get more views.”
Emory did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Georgia Tech could not confirm that Yadegari was admitted, citing privacy issues. Yadegari said he doesn’t plan to attend either of the Atlanta schools. He did visit Georgia Tech, he said in the video, and found that while the people there were “really cool, really smart … there were zero attractive girls and that is a huge thing for me because I’m really just going to college for the social life.”
In a follow-up post, Yadegari shared a document he titled “An open letter to admission offices.” Accusing schools of “social engineering,” he argued that the college system is “working exactly as designed.” Fit with President Donald Trump’s style of letterhead, the document is titled, “Make admissions fair again!”
He branded it that way to help it go viral, he said on YouTube, before saying it wasn’t meant to be a political statement.
“I definitely think that taking this opportunity of spotlight and using it for something good like reforming the admissions systems to make them more meritocratic would be amazing,” he said.
The college application process can be extremely competitive, particularly for Ivy League schools.
“Most Ivy League schools can fill their freshman class five to six times over with students who have perfect GPA’s and near-perfect ACT or SAT scores,” said Dan Lee, co-founder of Solomon Admissions Consulting based in New York City. Yadegari’s score of 34 on the ACT is below the 25th percentile for admitted applicants at most top 10 schools, Lee noted.
It’s also tough to get accepted to some of Georgia’s top universities. The average GPA for this year’s freshman class at Georgia Tech was 4.1, with average ACT and SAT scores of 32 and 1441, respectively. The average GPA for last fall’s first-year students at the University of Georgia was 4.19.
But schools look at more than numbers, experts say. Many top schools use a metric called “intellectual vitality,” which Lee said is meant to measure a student’s love for learning outside the classroom.
“What most students don’t understand is that top schools don’t have a metric for entrepreneurship,” he said, adding that many don’t have undergraduate business majors. “So it’s actually very common for students who founded very successful businesses in high school to not to get into any top schools.”
“They’re not necessarily looking for people who are going to make a ton of money. These are academic institutions and they’re admitting students who are going to achieve at a very high level academically,” he said.
Getting a patent, for example, shows intellectual vitality. But doing what Yadegari has done – co-founding Cal AI, an app that uses artificial intelligence to measure calories – isn’t something that a lot of schools are looking for.
“My definition of a great resume is a resume that’s tailored to what these top schools are looking for. Your definition of a great resume is somebody who started a business that makes $30 million a year,” said Lee.
At the moment, Yadegari said he is deciding between attending the University of Miami or the University of Texas. He’s leaning toward Miami, citing palm trees, a pool on campus and the girls.
It’s not clear, though, how long he’d even remain enrolled.
“I want to go enjoy it for a little bit,” he said. “And then I’ll probably drop out.”
Staff writer Caroline Silva contributed to this report.
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