"According to their findings, removing race as a factor in admissions dramatically reduces diversity while offering little to no improvement in academic qualifications."

I think you are missing the point.

The point is that every student should feel they have an "equal opportunity of being accepted" if they are qualified and that they were not rejected because of their skin color or gender or some other criteria not relevant to their ability to succeed at a given academic institution.

If we as a society think discrimination is bad, then you can't have good racism. And yet, affirmative action is simply systemic racism.

The alternative is not necessarily ranking all applicants on numerical basis, since such a system is open to the bias of the person doing the ranking.

Instead, the alternative can mean forcing admission departments to identify what qualities they should screen for to determine whether a student has the ability to thrive at their institution and then randomly selecting from among that group students to be offered acceptance.

Such a system assures every student that can succeed at a university feels they are not the victim of bigotry or discrimination. Furthermore, selecting randomly from everyone who is "good enough" to succeed keeps corruption out of the selection process.

One educational expert has advocating creating an affirmative action program not based on race on but based on economics. Carving out a selected number of admissions for students coming from disadvantaged family situations might produce a disproportionate number of minorities, yet such a system would give the poor white student who normally would have no chance under a traditional affirmative action program the same opportunity as anyone applicant coming from a disadvantaged home situation. Such a program could have "need" scholarships attached to them.

It is important not to reintroduce systemic racism to a country that has for decades tried to eliminate it from its institutions.