High School Degrees: Irrelevant?

Twenty percent of American high school graduates cannot pass the US Army entrance examination.
In Minnesota: 14 percent of white-, 20 percent of Hispanic-, and 40 percent of African-American-high school graduates cannot pass the US Army entrance exam.

Link is here.

A couple of comments:

a. If a high school graduate cannot pass the US Army entrance exam, he/she will not survive the "real" world. The Army is one big training program; it provides a drug-free, structured environment; it abounds with educators and mentors. There is minimal competition among recruits; they are trained to survive as team members. The American economy is all about individual competition and survival skills.

b. The report is somewhat skewed. The report is based on data from nearly 350,000 high school grads age 17-20 who took the Army's Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery between 2004 and 2009.  Generally speaking, it is my feeling that the lower-performing students apply to join the Army as enlisted recruits. So, things are not as bad as the report makes things out to be. When the report says that 40 percent of African-American high school graduates cannot pass the Armed Services test, it is not referring to the African-American student body as a whole, just those African-Americans coming out of high school who have tried to enlist in the Army.

c. It sounds like the problem is not that these students are not proficient enough to meet US Army standards, but the fact that schools have dumb-downed so much that they confer high school degrees on these folks.

d. Maybe it's even worse. Think of all the students that didn't consider the military because they knew they couldn't hack the entrance exams or the other requirements. Wow.