Peer pressure

Forget about U.S. News & World Report's college rankings for a moment.

For those in North Carolina's higher education system, there are two lists that are more important: The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems.

Both have provided lists of peers for North Carolina colleges that could be used to determine whether professors are getting comparable salaries to their colleagues.

A study by the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy*, which used the Carnegie peers, found that some North Carolina schools were doing just fine.

But those same colleges do worse when compared with the National Center's peers.

* Correction: An earlier version of this post misstated the foundation which funded the survey. The analyst works for the John Locke Foundation, but the study was done for the Pope Center.

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Here's an example:

According to the Carnegie Foundation, UNC-Chapel Hill's peers are 88 other institutions with "very high research activity," including Duke University, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Using that standard, all Chapel Hill professors have salaries at the 80th percentile of their peers.

But a study from the National Center has a much shorter list of just 15 colleges that it considers UNC-Chapel Hill's peers.

(For the record, they are: University of Pennsylvania, Emory University, Duke University, University of Southern California, U.C.L.A., U.C.-Berkeley, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, University of Virginia, Johns Hopkins University, University of Texas at Austin, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, University of Pennsylvania at Pittsburgh, University of Washington, University of Florida and University of Wisconsin at Madison.)

By that standard, all Chapel Hill professors are only at or above the mean and median salary of their peers.

The John Locke Foundation report singled out N.C. Central, UNC-Charlotte, UNC-Pembroke and Winston-Salem State as being at least 80 percent of peer salaries, but under the National Center's figures, only N.C. Central and UNC-Pembroke are at 80 percent. (Assistant professors at Winston-Salem would be at 80 percent, but not associate or tenured faculty.)