"College graduates earn more than a million dollars more than high school graduates over their lifetime." Every teenager has been bombarded with this oft-quoted statistic in hopes that it will convince them to want to pursue college after high school. But is it precisely university education that leads to wage inequality between graduates and graduates? Superficial reasoning would suggest so. It is obvious that additional education increases the graduate's human capital and perhaps this leads to higher productivity and higher wages. However, this only seems likely if you ignore what universities actually teach. Most of what is taught in universities will be of no use to graduates in their future careers. If the purpose of a university education were to increase job-related skills, they would look more like vocational schools where students would specialize in particular skills relevant to their future career, rather than study small amounts of each subject. Instead, to a large extent, the college's purpose is to act as an expensive reporting mechanism to assist employers in screening employees. A college education is more about showing off than acquiring useful job skills. However, this showing off comes at a huge price. We waste billions of dollars a year on this performance, not to mention four years of someone's life. These enormous social costs require us to rethink hiring practices and how universities serve their students. The college wage premium is a well-documented fact that is only trivially related to college. The college salary premium is really just a premium for intelligence and effort. In the business literature search and match... middle of paper... Graduating from college is one of the few surefire ways to earn a relatively large amount of money in your life, but what is learned in college is not responsible for the success of the graduate. The benefits of a college degree come from the signal it sends to employers that you are worthy of being hired. But this reporting is immensely costly overall. Millions of young men and women spend billions of dollars and years of their lives on unproductive and costly reporting. The current relationship between college and future wages and employment is imposing enormous deadweight losses on the U.S. economy. Changing longstanding norms about the university will be difficult, but it is vital. A slow transition to a new regime with alternative screening mechanisms for employers and universities teaching specialized skills and knowledge would improve everyone's situation.