MUNCIE – In crafting Indiana’s new high school diploma requirements, the state Department of Education identified only one of the two deep challenges to education in Indiana.

The new diploma might, and I stress might, help the smaller of the two problems. At the same time, it risks making the larger problem worse.

Michael Hicks, Bureau of Business Research

Indiana’s largest, and growing, problem is that we send too few young Hoosiers to college. The decade-long decline has been so bad, and so sustained, that we are now graduating and keeping young people beneath the replacement rate of our already dismal educational attainment.

This ensures we will slide toward the bottom of the nation in our share of college graduates by mid-century. That matters for our economy because over the past half-century more than 100% of economic growth accrued to places in the top half of educational attainment. So, if you wish to grow the place where you live – whether it’s a county, city or state – it needs to have better than average educational attainment.

The second problem is that too many young Hoosiers who don’t head to college lack the job skills to obtain meaningful employment that will lift them out of poverty. And, just to be clear, we have an excess supply of young Hoosiers who haven’t been to college.

I’m aware that large employers complain to economic developers and legislators that they struggle to find qualified workers for entry-level jobs. However, taking these complaints seriously is one of the worse examples of selection bias available today.

Employers that need college graduates or applicants with advanced degrees don’t typically complain to legislators. They recruit elsewhere.

That doesn’t mean the new diploma changes are without benefits. The new diploma does increase student exposure outside the classroom. Schools will be charged with finding more internships and developing more hands-on learning opportunities. Few Hoosier adults would find fault with that, except to acknowledge that these changes also come at a steep cost.

To accommodate work outside the classroom, the new diploma requirements reduce academic requirements across the board. In fact, under the new rules, it is now possible to get a high school diploma with mathematics courses that are mostly taught in middle school and have been since the 1920s. Math, science, literacy, history and writing requirements have all been reduced. These are the lowest diploma standards in modern state history.

The good news is that many families will ignore the minimum standards and aim for much more. If your parents are affluent college graduates and you attend a school in an affluent community, you’ll be fine. In fact, you may even be better off. Because so many smart kids in rural and poor school corporations will be funneled into less exacting academic programs, the competition for college slots will weaken.

That’s not good news, of course. The appropriate description of this likely outcome is unprintable in a family newspaper.

The reliance on Hoosier businesses crafting tens of thousands of new internship or externship positions is an obvious weakness.

The fact that many families will be unable to send kids to these internships should trouble anyone who prizes fairness in opportunity. Unpaid internships are great for affluent families, not so much for everyone else.

On top of these, the large tax revenue reductions to schools in Senate Enrolled Act 1 this year is already ending field trips in many schools. How in the world are schools going to find the resources to transport kids to and from the businesses offering these internship-type opportunities?

That might have been a good topic to discuss in the last legislative session.

The new diploma offers some nice soundbites, but it’s an engine of unequal opportunity and a near guarantee that we’ll send fewer kids to college, and that we’ll send them there less prepared. That will be a panacea for businesses looking to hire folks for $15 an hour jobs, but will do nothing to promote prosperity in Indiana.

Of course, none of these concerns appeared in the briefing slides or implementation guidance of the new diploma. State officials simply didn’t do their homework, which is a damning observation for folks involved in education. To illustrate that, I saved the very silliest aspect of the new diploma for last.

The new diploma offers a “military option” for graduation. When I first saw that, it warmed this old soldier’s heart. Then I read the rules and discovered it was a scam.

High school students can obtain a “military diploma” in three ways. Here, I think I should warn you to put down your coffee so you don’t spill it laughing.

The first way is to obtain an appointment to a service academy. That plausibly affects 50 or 60 Hoosier kids each year, all of whom would have met academic requirements for the “college preparatory” diploma by the time they finished their sophomore year of high school.

The second way is to enroll in a college ROTC program, which is the most common pathway to commission in the armed forces. But, you cannot enroll in a college ROTC program until you are in college. It’s almost like no one in the Department of Education knew that readily knowable fact. Some are probably learning it as they read this column.

The military has a special acronym for this sort of situation. It’s called a SNAFU.

Finally, you can enlist in the armed forces before high school graduation to satisfy the graduation requirement. To be clear, I love these options for post-secondary education. I chose that path, as did my father, all my uncles, my brother, a large share of my cousins and all three of my children.

But, as a recognized way to get a diploma, the best thing this can do is reveal how terribly little homework Indiana policymakers did when preparing these new diploma requirements. It is embarrassing.

I hope I’m very, very wrong about this new diploma and the damage I think it will do to academic standards and college preparedness. I hope I am wrong about the implementation. I hope that I am wrong in saying that students in the poorest schools will suffer. Nothing would make me happier than being wrong.

Sadly, for more than a decade, I’ve been crushingly right about Indiana’s education policy failures.