Just as I suspected, high school graduation requirements are all about keeping seats warm, not about actually teaching students anything. That will soon change in eight states, according to Sam Dillon in the NYT; as Kentucky education commissioner Terry Holliday says, “We’ve been tied to seat time for 100 years. This would allow an approach [to graduation] based… around move-on-when-ready.”
Those states will allow 10th-graders who pass a battery of subject examinations to proceed directly to postsecondary education — vaguely recalling the entrance examinations that Robert Hutchins’ administration applied to 16-year-olds applying to the University of Chicago in the 1940s.
I faced similar stupidity when I left high school after three years: at the time, North Carolina required four years of English credits. English classes from the local state university weren’t acceptable, either. A deal was struck wherein my high school would pre-print a diploma and hold it until I provided a transcript showing that I’d completed a year at university. (As far as I can remember, I never did pick up that diploma.) It appears that N.C. has lightened up and now allows students to complete English in four semesters, since it’s now a national leader in early college high schools.
west north 
hey! I’m 16…I dropped out over a year ago and i’ve been enrolled at the local community college for going on 3 months now. All that dropping out has taught me is that high school was an unimaginably massive waste of time.
A lot of people think that the first two years of college are basically a repeat of high school, so why not just let the high school students start college early. I wish that this option had come along sooner. I took the GED in TN when I was 18. I could have passed that test when I was 12. The only reason why the government insists on keeping the kids in ps for so many years is to keep getting the public funding to keep the schools open and the teachers’ unions happy.