This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 30th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

How do we get more productivity out of higher education?

One thing is clear, the task of measuring and rewarding productivity in higher ed has been complicated

by government subsidies to institutions and students.

Richard K. Vetter is a professor of economics at Ohio State University.

We spoke earlier this month.

There are lots of professors at the university a level who are waste of space.

I think I have some experience with some of them.

As was pointed out that these people, Dodgers as they are known, people who represent a relatively large amount of the costs for a university,

at least for payrolls, and represent a relatively small amount of the output, how do you get to those people?

How do you find out who they are and how do you gently recommend that they do something else?

Well, some of them are tenured faculty and people with tenure have legal protections make it very difficult to dislodge.

There are some people who teach at universities or I guess don't teach much at universities who don't have tenure.

You can identify fairly quickly in a quantitative sense who are doing relatively little.

You can identify fairly quickly in a quantitative sense who is not getting research monies.

There's research that can go on at universities that is not funded by outside money and there's activities

that people do at universities like advised students and have administrative work and all.

So not all people in this category are truly worthless or slackers, but it's fairly

easy to identify who the people who are not doing a lot is and then the issue is what do you do with them?

Well, in private business a solution simple you get rid of them. You say goodbye. Maybe give them a year. If you're in

business you give them a month. In academia we give them a year. But at least give

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