This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, February 25th, 2019. I'm Caleb Brown.

What drives the ballooning staff in higher education, administrators, and adjunct faculty everywhere?

But where are the tenure track professors at a Cato Institute conference supporting the release of the Cato Book Unprofitable Schooling books co-editor

Todd Zewicky offered this take. So there's a story I've heard that's credited

the story I've heard it was John of Kennedy was visiting the Vatican

with Pope John the 23rd. And Kennedy says to the Pope, how many people work in the Vatican?

And Pope John says, about half.

And why does that story come to mind,

which is we literally do not know what these people are doing.

I've looked everywhere. I've tried to find out what is.

We've got theories about what is driving the growth of administrative bureaucracy,

but we literally do not know who they are,

why it has grown so much, and whether or not it actually makes sense, right?

That is an important research agenda, I think for somebody, if they were interested

in tackling, which is to try to find out who these people are, what are they doing?

What we know is that there's a lot of them and that they're very highly paid.

I think of it in terms of there's you know I'm a law professor so I'm allowed to tell

lawyer jokes right but there's a sort of joke that one lawyer in a town will

will starve two lawyers in a town will starve, two lawyers in a town will thrive.

And that's kind of the way my impression is of academic bureaucracy is one academic

bureaucrat works, two hold meetings, and then hire third to actually do the work.

And so there's a sense in which they seem to be kind of creating make work for themselves,

...