CUNY graduation rates are falling fast — the fruit of the state Board of Regents’ war on standards with the city Department of Education’s eager cooperation.

Across CUNY, graduation rates plunged about a tenth these last five years, a drop from 62% in 2022 to 55.6% this past academic year at four-year colleges and from 38.9% to 35.5% at two-year schools.

CUNY’s much-admired three-year undergrad degree, the Accelerated Study in Associate Programs, saw grad rates collapse from 44% to 34.5%.

Since CUNY students are overwhelming the product of New York City public schools, this is clear evidence the Department of Education, after eight years of failed leadership under Mayor Bill de Blasio followed by prolonged COVID school closures thanks to the United Federation of Teachers, has been failing to prepare its graduates for college.

Ex-Gov. George Pataki is right to also blame the Regents-run State Education Department and Gov. Kathy Hochul’s failure to seek accountability, calling the Regents’ recent move to end the exams-based Regents diploma “incredibly stupid” and a cynical bid “to disguise the fact that too many New York state schools are failing to educate our kids.”

“Instead of doing the appropriate testing so that corrective measures could be taken to improve [kids’ performance], they simply get rid of the tests to hide their failure,” explains Pataki.

Scrapping the Regents diploma outright followed years of SED dumbing down the exams to keep graduation numbers up; now they’ve eliminated the bar entirely.

Yes, the “smart” students can still take Regents exams to show advanced proficiency — but now it’ll be easy for schools to look OK even though they demand nothing of the kids, who’ll mostly only realize they’ve been robbed later on.

Thanks to a fluke of the state Constitution, choosing the Regents is de facto up to Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, who sold his soul to the standards-hating teachers unions to acquire his post — but Hochul, and Gov. Andrew Cuomo before her, could and should have at least called out the betrayal of New York’s kids.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani plainly won’t lift a finger: He chose failed-upward functionary Kamar Samuels as his schools chancellor, and shows zero interest in education beyond expanding day care.

Maybe that’s wise, since all the adults with any responsibility for public education in this state seem to think that day care is all the schools really need to offer.