Business titan Richard Parsons called City Hall’s plan to scrap the specialized high school admissions test to boost diversity “insulting” Thursday — arguing that it demeaned black and Hispanic academic potential.

“Anytime someone proposes reducing or creating a second subordinate set of criteria to allow either black or brown kids or any kids to participate, the implicit message is you can’t cut it,” the former chairman of Citigroup said at a press conference outside Stuyvesant HS in Manhattan. “I don’t believe that.”

Hoping to diversify the city’s eight elite high schools, Mayor Bill de Blasio and schools Chancellor Richard Carranza lobbied to junk the current single-test system in favor of multiple assessment metrics.

Test critics call it an arbitrarily narrow measure of student talent that has boxed out kids of color who comprise roughly 70 percent of the city’s school system. They also argue that it rewards more affluent students with family resources for robust test preparation.

Backers say it rewards raw preparation and has helped to forge some of the nation’s top academic high schools.

The campuses are currently 62 percent Asian and 24 percent white, while the combined Hispanic and black student population stands at only 9 percent.

Parsons was joined at Thursday’s event by billionaire Ronald Lauder, who said his Bronx Science HS education propelled him to success with Estee Lauder, his family’s cosmetics firm.

“What I want is for all children to have this opportunity I had,” he said, stressing the need for quality free test prep.

The two heavyweights are backing Education Equity, a group formed to preserve the test and install reforms to diversify the schools.

De Blasio and Carranza eventually backed off their plan after meeting stern resistance last academic year — most vocally from Asian New Yorkers.

With City Hall now dithering, Education Equity said that they will launch an aggressive Albany legislative campaign to enact a proposal by Queens state Sen. Leroy Comrie to increase diversity.

Comrie wants to double the number of specialized high school seats, expand Gifted and Talented programs, guarantee free test prep, allow kids to take the test on a school day, and create a task force to examine the state of city middle schools where more than half of city kids failed basic English and math last year.

Lauder and Parsons have contributed close to a million dollars to pilot a specialized high schools admissions test preparation program for black and Hispanic kids.

Parsons said Thursday that Education Equity has been miscast as the product an elitist panic over specialized high school deterioration.

“It was interpreted as being somewhat almost racist,” he said. “Like we didn’t care about those who didn’t make the grade. Well, that’s exactly the opposite of what we are trying to do.”

City Councilman Robert Cornegy Jr. was also on hand Thursday, arguing that the gutting of Gifted and Talented programs has stanched black and Hispanic enrollment at the schools.

Education Equity leader Kirsten John Foy said City Hall’s proposal was a tacit capitulation. “It seems as though many of our leaders want us to acquiesce to mediocrity,” he said.

Asked how the group planned to finance its reforms, Foy pointed towards the DOE. “The Department of Education spends upwards of $30 billion,” he said. “We’ll find it.”