My alma mater, Gonzaga University, is on a building binge. Enrollment has increased in recent years from 4,500 to nearly 7,000 students. The Zags’ basketball success is part of it, as is the boomer bubble. Translation: The children born to baby boomers are in college now.

Not to sound like a sour alum – wouldn’t that be a great name for a drink? – but the bubble could burst as early as 2012, not just at GU but at all higher-ed institutions. The college-age population is expected to decline by then, and college-age kids in the coming decades might be less inclined to attend college because it will be so dang expensive.

Projecting college enrollment is a gambler’s game, and the bubble may never burst. But just in case, I have an idea that might keep GU – and other Inland Northwest colleges – vibrant far beyond 2012. I’m calling it Boomer University.

When boomer friends and I reminisce about our college experiences, two regrets surface. Those who partied too much wish they’d studied more. Those who studied too much wish they’d partied more. Boomer U will make wishes come true. Here’s my plan:

“Replicate the college experience – with a housing upgrade.

Boomer students will enroll for a semester in the college of their choice and pay full tuition. This will guarantee that professors keep their jobs during enrollment downturns. And boomer tuition will subsidize the education of students who couldn’t afford college otherwise.

Boomer U students will attend class with regular students and eat meals in the dining halls. But boomers will refuse to live in the crappy dorms of their college years, believe me. They won’t share bathrooms. They won’t put up with roommates.

Last weekend, I did a guest teaching stint at the University of San Francisco. I stayed at Loyola Village, a housing complex for graduate students. The spacious condos were decorated in sleek Dania furniture. Not a corkboard in sight. Loyola Village will be the prototype for Boomer U housing.

“No grades, no tests – papers optional.

Boomers will do the homework for their classes without the threat of tests and grades. And most will do papers just for the intellectual stimulation, because Boomer U will coincide with another cultural trend coming soon: the seeking out of intellectual depth. The pendulum is bound to swing back from our current YouTube wisdom.

It happened before. In the early 1950s, educators and intellectuals were worried that citizens, distracted by technology and propaganda, were no longer reading the classic works of great thinkers, such as Aristotle. They published the 54-volume Great Books of the Western World series to counter the “prevalent notion that the great mass of the people cannot form an independent judgment upon any matter, but they can be bamboozled.”

The professors who teach at our universities toiled for years to write dissertations with titles such as “A psycho-historical investigation of the personality and leadership of General George Custer” and “Existential implications of the Nazi death camps based on selected readings of four Jewish thinkers” and “Historical study of development of education in Iran between 1963 and 1978.”

Boomer U would make certain their intellectual work doesn’t get lost in our modern culture, which grows more bamboozled every day.

Boomer U: Aristotle by day, sour alum martinis by night. No more regrets. See you in class.