Proposed Indiana diploma doesn’t deliver

The buzzword from the Indiana Department of Education is “workforce readiness.”

As in that is the main goal and job of high school is to make sure they churn out 18-year-olds who can step across the stage, shake their principal’s hand and immediately head to the jobsite the next day.

Notice something missing? So do the state’s colleges.

The Indiana General Assembly has pushed the Department of Education to chuck the old Core 40 diploma and its strong emphasis on a well-rounded education that was keyed to the minimum requirements for admission to the state’s colleges. Instead, it is emphasizing “workforce readiness” in its new GPS diploma, which essentially encourages students to spend two years of high school in the classroom and much of their last two years working jobs and participating in non-school activities that earn “points” toward a diploma.

It’s a creative way to deal with the state’s worsening teacher shortage — just don’t offer as many classes and hope nobody notices.

As proposed, the new GPS (and GPS+) diploma doesn’t come close to meeting the minimum requirements to get into Indiana colleges, causing the colleges’ presidents to sound the alarm bells. A somewhat scrambled cover-your-hind-quarters attempt to add a “diploma ready” seal is a band-aid, but it’s not going to reduce the confusion for freshmen trying to map out their plans.

As a teacher, I have had multiple students who have told me they were not planning to go to college going into high school, but changed their minds after their sophomore or junior years. This new diploma track would make it difficult to backtrack and meet those requirements. To get the “Plus” diploma, students are required to work a job and have an industry certification. The ill-defined “Indiana College Core” curriculum was shoehorned into it later on.

The new diploma requires eight semesters of English and six of math, but only requires four semesters of social studies and four semesters of science — all of which are taken by the end of the sophomore year. The only required math course is first-year algebra (which is the lowest-level base course required by colleges). The other credits can come from lower-level math classes. Foreign languages are no longer required. World history and economics have also been dropped as required courses from the current Core 40 diploma. Essentially, the junior and senior years are “take an English class for two years, take math for one year and then either go work or take a bunch of electives.”

By comparison, Indiana University’s admission requirements include eight semesters of English and seven of math — four of algebra, two of geometry and one more of an advanced math course such as trigonometry, statistics or finite mathematics — but also six semesters of social studies (including world history), six semesters of science (including four semesters of “lab sciences” — biology, chemistry and physics) and four of foreign language.

The current Core 40 diploma nearly meets those requirements — it requires one less semester of math — but the GPS diploma doesn’t come close. What could be problematic is cash-strapped school corporations in smaller communities would not have the resources to offer the classes needed to meet those requirements.

Being “workforce ready” is good — but the best way to do that is to have a well-rounded education. Workers with a bachelor’s degree are nearly twice as likely to be employed and earn 67% more in wages than those who enter the workforce with only a high school diploma. The unemployment rate for those with a bachelor’s degree was 2.2% in 2023 — and lower for those with advanced degrees — while the unemployment rate for those with only a high school diploma was 3.9%. Average weekly earnings jumped from $899 to $1,493 with a bachelor’s degree.

As a teacher, I understand college isn’t for everyone, but even with that, providing students a well-rounded education is important in producing good, well-informed citizens. For example, dropping economics and world history as required courses will lead to a significant amount more ignorance about atrocities from around the world, and those who don’t know history are doomed to repeat it. The amount of economic illiteracy we already see in the world is high among politicans and voters. Making it worse by no longer requiring students to understand where money comes from and how the forces of supply and demand work is how we end up with people believing bad ideas like protectionism, rent control and socialism work.

What the GPS — and especially the GPS+ — diplomas are designed to do is churn out worker bees for factory jobs that typically don’t pay well and have been drying up for a half-century. But it’s no surprise coming from a General Assembly full of rural legislators with misplaced nostalgia for the “good old days” when Indiana’s small towns churned out parts for Buicks and Chryslers, and its workers went straight from high school to the assembly line.

In a way, it feels as if the state government wants to discourage its students from going to college by weakening the graduation requirements. And, from the perspective of a rural legislator, there’s a reason why. First of all, colleges do skew left-of-center, and there is fear students grow up in conservative communities, go to school and their values change. Given that most elected officials’ main job is re-election, a rural Republican legislator doesn’t want to encourage young people to spend four years among Democrats.

Second of all, there’s some self-preservation happening. Indiana’s rural population has been declining for years, while urban and suburban areas — especially near Indianapolis and Fort Wayne — have been booming. The rural share of Indiana’s population declined from about 38% in 1980 to less than 25% today.

If students begin working at the local factory or warehouse in high school, they may continue to work there and eschew college, whereas if they leave to go to school, there is a very good chance they won’t return — in part, because there aren’t many jobs available in small towns for workers with degrees.

And there’s a cultural component. As J.D. Vance noted in Hillbilly Elegy, the way of life doesn’t change as much in rural America, and parents tend to struggle when their kids don’t experience life in the same way they do.

And especially among the older generations in places like Marion, Anderson and Connersville, “experiencing life” meant graduating from school, spending 40 years on the assembly line, living in the same community, going to the same church, sending your kids to the same school and going to the same high school basketball game together on Friday nights. It’s not bad to experience that, but it’s also not bad to aspire to have a job in suburban Indianapolis and send your kids to those schools.

However, the loss of that bond as the town’s kids go to college, find work near the big city and never come back home has been a long lament in Indiana’s smaller communities. It feels as if the GPS diploma is a means of attempting to direct resources back to creating some of that nostalgia.

But in the long run, Hoosier students lose out with fewer opportunities and lower aspirations being placed on them. And so do their employers, who will have fewer highly-educated, highly-skilled workers to choose from.