High school diplomas all across New York state will soon be meaningless if the Board of Regents gets away with scrapping a requirement for students that dates back more than 150 years: passing several Regents exams.

Officially, the board is simply putting a blue-ribbon commission in charge of exploring alternatives to a state-certified diploma, en route to implementing new graduation standards in fall 2020.

Yet the Regents’ professed goal gives it all away: They’re out to goose graduation rates — and the easiest, fastest way to do that is to simply make it easier to graduate.

Their spokesfolks are dressing it up in noise about “providing different avenues — equally rigorous — for kids to demonstrate they are ready to graduate with a meaningful diploma.” It still comes down to not requiring students to pass objective tests so you can hand diplomas to kids who can’t pass.

Yes, the statewide graduation rate should be higher than last year’s 80.4%. As state Chancellor Betty Rosa wrote in February, “The system is not working for everyone and too many students — particularly our most vulnerable students — are leaving high school without a diploma.”

But killing a key requirement for graduation doesn’t do a thing to stop the system from failing those kids — it just makes the failure less obvious.

And that, clearly, is all the current Regents and their political masters really care about.