What is the purpose of higher education exactly? Do students really learn anything they actually use later in life? The evidence suggests not. Study after study shows that students learn very little in college, and what they do learn often isn’t relevant to the career they end up pursuing.

On the other hand, there definitely is a college degree premium in the job market. College graduates end up making 75% more on average over their lifetimes than those without college degrees.

But if the colleges themselves aren’t teaching students marketable skills, then what service are they providing, exactly? Some people argue that colleges act as a filtering mechanism, signaling to employers which job applicants are the most worthy of a job offer. The more prestigious and selective a school is, under this theory, the more likely a prospective employer should value graduates from that school.

But how good are colleges at selecting the most worthy candidates? A new poll of 1,600 college students by Intelligent.com suggests they aren't very good at it at all.

A shocking 60% of respondents admitted to lying on their college applications, with 70% of those that lied claiming that their lies went either unnoticed or unmentioned during the admissions process. Even when colleges did flag a falsehood, more than one-third of students caught fibbing said there weren’t any consequences.

The poll also allowed students to identify what exactly was false on their college applications.

More than 40% said they lied about volunteer hours they never actually completed, 39% listed fake jobs, 39% misrepresented their race, 38% listed fake extracurricular activities, 30% falsified letters of recommendation, and 22% said they were disabled when they were not.

Some of these items may seem trivial. But of those that lied, more than 60% believe that their lies helped them get into the school they are attending.

It appears that our nation’s most selective colleges are being lied to during their selection process, and they don’t seem to care.

Why exactly are we spending hundreds of billions of state and federal tax dollars on institutions that aren’t preparing young adults for the workforce or even decently sorting candidates for prospective employers?

With so many economic rewards going to those who complete the college process, we need to rethink what colleges are teaching and how they are selecting applicants.