There's no looming threat ofa 'brain drain' in UNC system

BYLINE: JANE S. SHAW Guest Columnist

RALEIGH -- Is the University of North Carolina suffering a "brain drain" because faculty pay isn't high enough? Some people think so. The political action committee Citizens for Higher Education stated last year that faculty who left UNC-Chapel Hill's College of Arts and Sciences in 2005 averaged a 51 percent increase in pay, but offered only a couple of anecdotal examples. System president Erskine Bowles has asked the General Assembly for nearly $90 million to bring faculty salaries throughout the system up to the 80th percentile among peer institutions. And Bowles ranked the UNC faculty benefits package among the worst in the country.

Now, a new report released by the think tank I head, the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, provides objective information to help answer the question. The 75-page report indicates that average faculty compensation in the UNC System compares reasonably well with peer institutions. The situation is far from dire.

Full professors at Chapel Hill, for example, are already compensated at levels close to the 80th percentile of their peers. Their compensation levels rank 23rd out of 91 institutions. Associate and assistant professors are not as high, but all are above the median.

Compensation differs dramatically by campus, however. Full professors at N.C. State are not simply below the 80th percentile -- they are below even the median. UNC-Asheville is below the median of its peers on all three faculty levels (professor, associate, and assistant) and Greensboro's N.C. A&T State University is below the median for two faculty levels. On the positive side, four campuses are already at the 80th percentile level for all levels and 11 are at or above the median.

Here's how we came to these conclusions. The report's author, Jon Sanders, started with the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) annual report that gives compensation (salary plus benefits) for several hundred institutions. He matched the UNC campuses with their peer institutions, as grouped by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. For example, Chapel Hill and N.C. State are both in the category of "Research Universities-Very High Research Activity," along with such schools as Duke, Princeton and the University of Florida.

Sanders then adjusted all these figures to reflect the cost of living in the university cities, using a widely accepted index from the Council for Community and Economic Research (formerly known as ACCRA). He compared UNC averages to the other schools in the category.

Opinions about what exactly is a "peer" institution can differ. Not satisfied with using the Carnegie groupings, UNC hired a consultant, Dennis Jones, to select a dozen or so peer institutions for each campus. Sanders looked at these institutions, too. By these comparisons, UNC compensation didn't rank as high. But in Sanders' view, the much broader Carnegie classification is a more realistic measure. It "provides a fuller picture of the competitive environment for university faculty."

So is there a brain drain? We now have a first cut of an answer. It doesn't seem likely, certainly not at Chapel Hill where average pay for full professors went up by 10 percent last year. Compared to peers, the UNC faculty as a whole is generally well-compensated.

But the Pope Center report also warns us that each campus should be viewed individually. Faculty on some campuses do have average salaries below their peers. And an even finer-grained distinction needs to be made among departments. Are some departments paying too little, with high-paying departments masking the weak ones?

Furthermore, there is an even more direct way to determine whether there is a "brain drain." A "brain drain" would mean a net loss of intellectual firepower as faculty members are recruited away to other schools. Do we see one? At Chapel Hill, according to the executive associate provost, around 30 to 50 professors are recruited to other institutions each year. This is about 1.5 percent of the faculty. By any measure, this is far from crisis.

So let's not be too worried. There may be a need for significant competitive adjustments on some campuses but not huge across-the-board increases for the UNC system. And things look pretty good for most of the faculty at Chapel Hill.

Jane S. Shaw is the executive vice president of the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh.