By STEVE DUNLEAVY

January 15, 2007 -- IF you think college is overpriced, under tutored and overly liberal, you have a cheerleader in Jason Mattera.

Mattera is a spokesman for Young America's Foundation, a conservative activist group based in Washington, D.C., and Santa Barbara, Calif. He has compiled a list of college courses that give new meaning to the word "useless."

"One of the most bizarre courses is offered at Occidental College in Los Angeles," Mattera told me. It is a course called "The Phallus."

The curriculum lists the subjects: "The relation between the phallus and the penis, the meaning of the phallus, phallologocentrism, the lesbian phallus, the Jewish phallus, the Latino phallus and relation of the phallus and fetishism."

If I'm at a loss for words, it's probably because I dropped out of high school, thank God.

Occidental spokesperson Jim Tranquada, a former newspaper reporter, told me: "We offer more than 800 courses, and just picking out that one is poor methodology."

Horsefeathers, Jim.

Mattera goes on: "Some colleges also can't seem to shake off a strong admiration for Karl Marx and his murderous ideology."

For example, at prestigious Amherst College in Massachusetts, there is a course titled "Taking Marx Seriously," which seems at first glance fair enough.

But students are asked: "Should Marx be given another chance?"

Coming to Marx's rescue, the course concludes that Lenin, Stalin and Pol Pot misapplied the ideas of Marx. The poor, misunderstood lad.

Other wacko college courses include Cornell University's "Sex, Rugs, Salt and Coal."

The students ponder: Why are Oriental rugs collector's items? How did we come to keep salt shakers on our dinner tables? When did coal start replacing wood as a fuel source?

Cornell also teaches "Cyberfeminism," whatever the hell that means.

The University of Colorado beckons with "Lesbian, Bisexual and Gay Literature."

And Johns Hopkins has a course on mail-order brides, for crying out loud.

No wonder The Chronicle of Higher Education says 40 percent of college students need remedial work in math and English.

The list goes on and on with idiocies. It's a testament to why overpaid college presidents should get a course titled "Common Sense."

steve.dunleavy@nypost.com