Sometimes I wonder if my two boys will actually go to college.

This is an educated guess based on keen reasoning, a journalist’s trained eye and the knowledge that they are both profoundly goofy.

Actually, that also describes my college roommate, Gary, who used to smoke a cigar and eat nacho-cheese-flavored Doritos, simultaneously — while showering.

My 6-year-old son can do math problems in his head, but he also does anatomy experiments involving bodily fluids.

“Daddy,” he announced last week, “watch this. I can say ‘yes’ without actually opening my mouth.”

“Yesss!,” he hissed through clenched teeth, spittle flying through the hole where his top incisors used to be.

“Nice,” I said. “But please don’t do that in public.”

“OK,” he said, wiping his mouth with his shirtsleeve.

Meanwhile, my nearly-2-year-old son has been busy composing his own language. He has a high-pitched voice like one of those Ewoks in “Star Wars.”

He has become fixated on car keys; he calls them “tees.” He will spend hours with a set of “tees,” poking them into doorjambs, probing between the laces of footballs, jabbing them into his brother’s facial orifices.

He makes up other words, too. For breakfast he always wants a gruel made of “yeah-yope” (yogurt), “BBs” (blueberries) and “zoop” (maple syrup).

I have constructed this “no college” scenario for the boys partly because of my growing exasperation with college tuition increases. No matter how much we set aside in their college savings accounts, it never seems like enough. Still, I suppose they’ll muddle through.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, college tuition is up 439 percent since 1985, about four times the rate of overall inflation. What really got me hot were recent reports that some private colleges have discovered that they can attract more applicants simply by raising tuition, essentially for show.

According to an article in this month’s Money magazine: “In the absence of any objective measure of the value of an education, price becomes the default yardstick.”

What?

The article quotes an administrator at a small, liberal arts school who says that when his school raised tuition 29 percent in 2005 that applications immediately shot up 40 percent.

OK, time out. Now, it’s the parents who are acting goofy.

It seems that some of the private colleges are using the money, not to improve instruction or raise faculty salaries necessarily but to serve fancy food and to build ritzy student centers and workout clubs.

For families for whom money is no object, this is all well and good.

But what I see is too many young adults with $120,000 (and more) college educations chasing $30,000 a year jobs. One day, I think parents and students will wake up to this math, and the private-college cost bubble will burst.

In the meantime, my family will keep saving and hoping the boys can get admitted to a friendly, low-cost State U.

Actually, there’s a lot to be said for struggling a bit in college — remember ramen noodles anyone? There’s sure no meal ticket after graduation.

I say save the gourmet dining for later. In the meantime, let them eat zoop.

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