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.

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 ac

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