“Not only is God dead, but just try to find a plumber on weekends.” — Woody Allen

The College Board, the private “nonprofit” that tortures millions of young people with the SAT and helps keep the Princeton, N.J., area one of the plushest in America, now wants the federal government to boost funding for Pell Grants enough to cover the average cost of tuition, fees, and room and board for any student attending a four-year public college. (Contrary to some assumptions, by the way, former U.S. Sen. Claiborne Pell, though a very rich person, does not pay for the grants named after him.)

An increase in Pell Grants would be good for the College Board, of course — more money for colleges, thus more people taking the SATs and more money and perks for employees of the College Board, especially the bosses.

But it doesn’t deal with the reality that colleges usually find ways to swiftly boost their costs to gobble up any increases in public or private grants and scholarships. After all, the economic size of the college industry has for a generation grown at several times the general inflation rate. When it comes to colleges, C. Northcote Parkinson is almost always right: “Expenditures rise to meet income.” You’d need an increase in Pell Grants every month to keep up with colleges’ empire building.

The College Board also doesn’t face the issue that no one wants to deal with: Why should so many people go to college? Why can’t more young people go to vocational school, or start jobs or apprenticeships right after high school, as so many do in Europe? Society has far more need of more electricians and plumbers than of more white-collar drudges. But the rhetoric is that everyone is owed “a college education,” whatever that really means intellectually. Indeed, as more and more people go to college, the general level of literacy and overall knowledge seems to fall. So should colleges continue to eat up an ever larger percentage of America’s resources?

As with most organizations, higher-education administrations have an insatiable thirst for more and more money, to expand facilities and bureaucracies. An aim is to further enrich the organizations’ executives and make them feel more powerful — er, “respected.” Thus many college presidents and other executives receive gigantic salaries and a host of other benefits — most of them not taxable. That’s what some of the tax-financed Pell Grants pay for.

It’s just old-fashioned human nature. Not many of us would prefer to avoid being richer and more powerful. Megalomania is so common that it is inaccurate to call it a sickness. So you virtually never hear of a college administrator saying, “My mission is to make this place smaller.”

Indeed, few organizations are so top-heavy with administrators (and endless meetings) — and so slow and inefficient — as those in higher education. Admittedly, that is in part because of the power of tenured faculty, who tend to love to talk and gum up the gears for long stretches, without fear of being fired.

And for “nonprofits” in the rest of the higher education industry, life can be very good indeed. College Board executives live like millionaires; indeed, some are millionaires. (It reminds me of the Grosvenor family, which has made fortunes on the “nonprofit” scam known as the National Geographic Society through, among other things, assiduous cultivation of Washington movers and shakers. Taking compensation in the form of “expenses” — love those “research” trips to Paris! — can certainly be very pleasant, especially at income-tax time.)

Since politicians like to present themselves as ever-more-generous supporters of “college for everyone,” it’s doubtful that this lucrative empire building in higher education will fade anytime soon. “Making a college education open to everyone” is one of those slogans so alluring that remarkably few people stop for a second to analyze what they really mean.