It has been a very long time since a high school diploma was a meaningful credential in America. Decades of relentlessly lowered academic standards in our public schools have turned many of our classrooms into glorified daycare centers and has left us with a zombie army of high school graduates who know nothing, can do nothing, and will likely accomplish nothing other than bumping along at the bottom of our social and economic ladder during their entire lives.

Unsurprisingly, the standardized tests that document this decline are sneered at by the education establishment and teacher unions, who are concerned more about keeping the paychecks flowing than lifting a finger to do the hard and, quite frankly, wildly unpopular job of insisting on learning and refusing to give passing grades to the hordes of obliviously stupid, fantastically entitled, and depressingly lazy young people roaming the hallways of so many of our nation’s public schools. One could write a book assigning blame for this catastrophe, which as been accelerated by the steep decline of moral standards throughout America (as well as a frightening lack of governmental competence and courage), but the result has been that we spend hundreds of billions of dollars every year on public education systems that educate few and ruin the futures of many.

It was inevitable that this crisis would eventually wash up on the doorsteps of America’s colleges and universities, all of which must somehow must keep their seats filled from a relatively small pool of high school graduates who are actually prepared for higher education. Given the pressure to keep those tuition checks rolling in, the erosion of academic standards and push to create majors that require less rigorous study has proceeded on its sad course until we today face a situation where employers report that many recent graduates are grievously deficient in the basic skills needed for workplace success.

And so we are today hearing calls for college Exit Examinations to ensure that the academic competencies we expect from a college degree are actually there.

It would, of course, make far more sense for colleges to just stop admitting students who are academically unprepared for higher education, but this would lead to the immediate closure of many campuses because there are simply not enough college-ready high school graduates available to keep them all open. Given the foolish, decades-long effort to push “college for all” while weighing down students and their parents with student loans, the reality is we have an wildly overbuilt infrastructure of higher education, which is already resulting in the closure of colleges that have seen their student populations shrink as more and more questions are asked about the cost-benefit balance of many degree programs—and lower birthrates push many institutions off a demographic cliff. Squeezed from all sides, the downward march of academic standards continues to devalue college diplomas, and we are where we are today.

Would Exit Exams help provide some much-needed credibility to college degrees? It is possible, but it will be a battle that will test the resolve of our nation.

First, it must be recognized that America’s higher education establishment will fight tooth and nail against any mandate requiring Exit Exams for their graduates. The outcry from students and parents who paid for four (or five or six) years of college, only to find out that no degree is forthcoming, would be a public relations disaster and inevitably lead to lawsuits demanding refunds for a job not well done. Determining the relative culpability of the colleges, students, and other factors would be a bonanza for lawyers but a nightmare for institutions whose neglect of their students would be plain for all to see.

However, should a requirement for Exit Exams be eventually pressed upon colleges, they would likely initially try to take a page from the pitiful playbook of states that were compelled to measure public school outcomes in decades past: design ridiculously easy tests so that as many students as possible can simply stumble over the finish line and “succeed”. So-called “holistic” measures that manage to give potential college graduates credit for being carbon-based life forms would spring up like weeds around America and provide employment for academic professionals whose entire jobs it would be to guarantee everyone passes the phony-baloney assessments designed by college faculty who like their paychecks and benefits—and want them to continue.

The alternative, of course, would be a series of nationally-administered tests that would resemble the Advanced Placement (AP) tests that have long been administered to high school students who are seeking college credit. It would, in fact, be very easy to simply require that all college graduates earn at least a 3 (on the 5-point scoring scale) on a required set of AP exams and avoid the need for the lengthy process of designing an entirely new set of tests. Given that college seniors would already have had the benefit of nearly four years of supposedly rigorous college work, any student who cannot meet even this minimum benchmark obviously should not be granted a degree. Moreover, knowing that these tests were ahead of them, this requirement might convince more than a few college students to party less and study more.

At the very minimum, I would strongly advocate that all potential 4-year college graduates be required to earn at least a 3 on the following AP exams in order to demonstrate basic competencies that we should expect before being granted a degree: AP English Language and Composition, AP United States Government and Politics, AP United States History, AP World History: Modern, and at least one other test of their choice. This requirement could, of course, be waived if students had already completed these tests in high school.

Would this requirement be met with shrieks of dismay, intense political pressure, and claims of discrimination? Absolutely. The anti-test, anti-standards, anti-American lobby is both well-entrenched and well-funded.

Education “experts” will wail it is unfair to allow this requirement to impede graduation for deserving students, who will cry on cue for the cameras. However, as much as one might feel badly for young adults who suddenly discover their college coursework did not prepare them adequately, we must recognize that continuing to hand out Bachelor’s degrees to the incompetent does deep and lasting harm our entire nation—damage that continues to erode our prosperity, civic order, and national security on a daily basis.