Hi there, friend. I'm Asian American as well, and I remember being in your shoes when I was your age a little over a decade ago. I too also loved programming language theory and very much adored my time studying it in college. What I can do is give you some good news and some bad news.

The bad news is that what you're going through now is real. It's unfair, and it's going to hurt. The truth is that you are seeing the effect of a system that means to optimize superficial representation and not the root cause of the problem of income inequality. People are going to game the system. Folks will get in without merit, and folks without merit that should have it will not get in. Worse yet, when you get out of college, these folks are going to have an advantage over you in the early phases of their career. They'll get undue (even insulting, if you think about it) attention for their racial background, and generally have an easy time getting their foot in the door for top tier roles in investing, startup founding, and corporate strategy. The system will, for a while, be capable of giving them affirmative action. But, the unfair advantage ends there.

Beyond just your own experience, think about what that implies. It means that educational institutions that reject meritocracy are going to slowly crumble as they are no longer compete to be the most intellectually rigorous institutions. I didn't go to an Ivy league university, despite the, ahem, very forceful "advisory" of my parents. I instead went to a tiny liberal arts college where I double majored in CS and Music. My college had a mandatory humanities core, so I learned to read and write and be critical and think. I learned not just to research history, but make sense of it. I learned how to make sense of culture, past and present. I learned how to make sense of computation, data structures and algorithms, and get a grounding of the tools I'd use to make elegant solutions to problems.

When I first started my career, I felt hampered by my lack of a name brand education and my Asian American ethnic identity. I felt passed over by investors when I wanted to start a company (although in retrospect, I think that's in part because I, like almost any other startup founder out of college, was not fit to start a company), and I felt passed over by hot startups and big companies for fast tracker career roles. But, something changed about four or five years through my career.

The problems started getting bigger and less clearly defined -- it made sense, as I was getting more senior and the scope of my work was growing. My hunger and desire to push and prove myself kept growing as well. I continued to look in the mirror and ruthlessly try to improve my worst flaws so that I could be more effective and not stagnate. While it didn't happen immediately, one day I realized on the job that these Ivy league educated folks who I used to feel like were miles ahead of me all of a sudden weren't very far ahead of me at all. In fact, it was more often the case that when we were working together, I would be the one taking the lead. I was the one leading the great charges into the unknown. I was the one writing the script, and figuring out how to get the problems solved. And this was just during the work part of it -- things got even more lopsided during the spirited lunchroom barroom debates about life, the universe and politics -- for some reason, the Ivy league educated colleagues (at least those who seemed to derive a lot of their identity from their pedigree) seemed to have a certain rigidity in thought, a certain degree of haughtiness, and a certain inability to adapt and grow. They often couldn't keep up in debates and conversations compared to folks who went to less pedigreed schools but clearly took their education more seriously.

They couldn't make judgment calls and take risks. They couldn't solve problems both quickly and deeply. My work rivalries were almost never with them. The only other folks I had to compete with for top tier performance and promotion were almost always folks like me. Folks who were sharp, who treated their career like a portfolio, who were ambitious, who wanted every project they worked on to be bigger and better than the last, and who would be dissatisfied if that wasn't the case. This didn't preclude the Ivy league educated colleagues, but I realized that just as in the general population, the percentage of Ivy league educated colleagues with that level of ambition was low. I eventually made it to my destination in the startup world (head of engineering a funded startup with a solvent business model and a blank check) at the same speed as them, if not faster. And now, I'm at a top tier big company, and I realize that a lot of them despite their shiny pedigree wouldn't make it here either.

I guess what I'm saying to you is that I agree with your premises but be careful about the conclusions you draw. You are right to note that affirmative action is ethically wrong. But take that observation further and observe that it is also systemically flawed. Whether it is ethically right or wrong, it simply does not work. The real world careers that you end up in have challenges which are so difficult and challenging that students of institutions who engage in these kinds of appearances over rigor (which is a disturbing amount, especially in prestigious institutions) are ill prepared for its rigors and find difficulty succeeding. It's best to understand that the prestige of institutions that used to be synonymous with their educational rigor is no longer coupled to that, and once you have true rigor competing against prestige, rigor eats prestige for lunch every day of the week. So you didn't get into an institution, and you figure it's because of affirmative action? It's rough, but did you get into an institution that will be good enough? Will you learn the skills you need to learn and then learn the rest on the job? Yes. To be honest, the best educational institution in the world cannot remotely compete with the on the job training you'll get from a good mentor at a top tier startup or tech company. So, focus on your habits, your skills, and your own unique identity. You like PL theory and FP, right? That's great! Try to figure out where it's used in the industry. Send emails to researchers. Make comments on social media. Start blogging. Participate in the public discourse. Once you build up momentum there, you'll be your own brand and it won't matter where you go to university (I say this with the understanding that you did indeed get into a good engineering school anyways, as I saw further on doing the thread -- it just didn't happen to be your absolute first choice).

The truth is these days, where you went to college is such a lossy signal by mid career that it may as well not even matter. There are plenty of ambitious go getters from state schools who far out perform folks who went to Ivy league universities by at least mid career, enough that you should just focus on learning how to learn in college (and for that, I highly recommend expanding your horizons a little into philosophy, history, art and science), and learning how to get ahead after college. Don't be intimidated by prestige games. Maybe things will change one day, but for now, there is still plenty of space to make an impressive fulfilling career by focusing on how to find and solving good, hard problems. If you're at all interested in having an expanded conversation on this, let me know. It might be many years later, but I remember exactly how it felt being in your shoes, and there are so many things I wish someone had told me that I just had to figure out myself in my own career.