The expected consequence of eliminating race-based affirmative action is that URM students will instead attend less selective universities where they're more likely to persist. Sure, the university they graduate from may not be as prestigious. But on the flipside, they'll be more likely to graduate in the field they actually wanted to study. They'll also probably save a lot of money, since changing majors partway through usually means that these students take 5 or 6 years to graduate.
1. https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14885/w148...
2. "Persistence rate" means the rate at which students complete their declared major. It's rare for students to drop out of university entirely, much more common is that they change to a less demanding major - that is, they don't persist in their initial major.
They would also graduate with a STEM major, which would likely enable more lucrative career options.
> this is the claim of some recent research
It looks like this working paper is over a decade old. Was it published recently?
> Black college freshmen are more likely to aspire to science or engineering careers than are white freshmen, but mismatch causes blacks to abandon these fields at twice the rate of whites. [1]
1: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/the-pai...