American higher education is a lot of bark with a soft bite. I can only think of three benefits it brings to society.First and fuzziest are the civil gains. A more educated electorate will theoretically make better decisions at the ballot booth and give us all better government. Dispassionately observing the health care debate, I imagine these effects are negligible.Second, college education brings skills to society. We need engineers, accountants and statisticians to crunch our numbers. If college teaches you how to speak French, Spanish or international finance, than the world just got that much smaller.When universities teach skills, they are doing an unquestionably good thing. If only the third were as beneficial.We live in a universe where certainty is expensive and information comes at a high price.Companies need to know how well potential employees can work, learn and deal with stress. Prospects have incentives to lie, so asking about skills at the interview doesn’t help. The third function is to provide a way for employees to signal their ability. As long as there’s a correlation between work ethic and holding a diploma, an employer will pay more for college graduates — even if their education is unrelated to their job.Knowledge is expensive, so you’re squandering four potentially productive years watching PowerPoint presentations on (insert your least favorite subject here).There’s nothing wrong with signaling. You play that game every time you update your Facebook or espouse a political belief.Hummer and Prius drivers  signal their testosterone levels. Lovers signal their commitment with engagement rings. Parents signal social status by sending their kids to the Ivy League.After passing his stimulus bill, President Barack Obama called on all Americans to “commit to at least one year or more of higher education or career training … Every American will need to get more than a high school diploma.”If America’s higher education system were providing skills useful in the workplace, I’d definitely agree.But for the majority of degrees, college is just a signaling game. Increasing enrollment erodes the value of diplomas for those who have them. Certification inflation means people have to waste even more of their life in graduate school to send the same signal.More distressingly, certification inflation puts those who can’t go to college on even worse footing. Rather than lacking a signal saying, “I belong to an elite group,” those without a college degree now lack a signal saying, “I managed to sit through a grade-inflated snooze-fest.”Diluting the value of signals hurts those with and without the signal.As economist Bryan Caplan put it: “Going to college is a lot like standing up at a concert to see better. Selfishly speaking, it works, but from a social point of view, we shouldn’t encourage it.”Stories are more interesting when there’s a villain, but there are no bad guys here. The government made college attendance a priority, and individuals followed their incentives to the current disaster. In economic lingo, we need to correct for positional externalities, or at least not exacerbate them.I’m morally against government subsidizing and taxing to change behavior, but if not, I’d support eliminating all scholarships and putting a sin tax on degrees without calculus.Liberal arts professors, don’t process this as an attack on your statuses. Think of this as a way to ensure only the most committed and intelligent students attend exciting class discussions.Disinterested students, you shouldn’t have to get a degree. Imagine what a better position you would be in if it were more respectable to not have a diploma because instead, you spent the last four years interning in your field. We should be celebrated, not shunned, autodidacts (look it up).For those who value traditional education, imagine if all society shared your respect. Ending state education subsidies and taxing liberal arts degrees would make a university education worth something again.If that’s too jarring, perhaps we could compromise and merely privatize the university system and take government distortions out of education decisions.We can all agree, the status quo bites.Daniel Morgan is a 21-year-old economics senior from Baton Rouge. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_dmorgan.————Contact Daniel Morgan at [email protected]