Diplomas on your wall. Degrees in your signature block. Are those the best measures of educational accomplishment?

Martin Scaglione suggests it’s time to update our definition of success. That sounds a bit surprising, coming from the man who’s president of work force development for ACT, the college entrance exam people. But, as reported in Friday’s Spokesman-Review, Scaglione is part of a growing movement in business and education that believes the gold-standard four-year college education is not the best path for many students.

Scaglione would be intrigued by what’s happening on North Idaho’s Rathdrum Prairie, where three public school districts are on the verge of putting that belief into action.

If all goes as planned – including voter approval this summer of a two-year property tax assessment in the Coeur d’Alene, Post Falls and Lakeland school districts – the Kootenai Technical Education Campus, or KTEC, will open in a 50,000-square-foot facility for the 2013-’14 school year. Some 180 students from the three districts will enroll there in classes designed to produce welders, machinists, diesel mechanics and other skilled tradespeople.

The kinds of well-paying jobs that often go begging, to the dismay of frustrated would-be employers.

If the idea sounds familiar, maybe you were paying attention a decade or so ago when several schools in the Spokane region were pushing a concept labeled “tech prep” – a course of study that delivered a curriculum geared toward vocational readiness, emphasizing applied rather than theoretical math, for example.

Sadly, and to the disadvantage of a generation of students, it couldn’t overcome a prevailing public conviction that anything but a four-year degree equaled intellectual deficiency. Tech prep was suspected of being a scheme to divert some youngsters from the cherished college track, and it never won the enthusiasm it deserved.

KTEC doesn’t use the term tech prep, but the program it’s intended to become, including a North Idaho College facility on the same site, responds to the same, persistent work-force objective.

Skilled workers are desperately needed in the trades where KTEC will focus its efforts. Without a trained labor pool, manufacturing and other businesses are at a disadvantage in the Inland Northwest. And not just here. To the north, in boomtown Calgary, employers have gone so far in recent years as to fill their high-paying jobs with workers flown in from as far away as India.

The biggest winners from a successful technical education program are youngsters – specifically, capable youngsters who aren’t oriented toward a classic academic setting. Many businesses have known for some time that solid career opportunities are regularly squandered because vocational training programs are treated by a disdainful public as an educational consolation prize.

For some students, college is not only appropriate but essential. For others it’s irrelevant. The new educational currency, as Martin Scaglione has proposed, should be the skills that one acquires.