RALEIGH – Sound budgeting is about setting priorities and sticking to them. That’s easy to say but not so easy to do. Whether the budget is a household’s, a company’s, a charity’s, or state government’s, there will inevitably be more useful or attractive things to buy than available funds will allow. You have to say no to good ideas offered by good people, in the interest of saying yes to better or more pressing ideas.

There are some exceptions. On no rational ranking of government’s priorities, for example, would you find a line for building a theater named after Dolly Parton’s brother. But for the most part, once there is a public consensus behind spending tax dollars on a given function – the consensus might be wrongheaded, but that’s life – the question is how high that function ranks in immediate need, efficiency, or likely return on the public investment.

With this exposition, let’s turn to the familiar complaint from the hallowed halls of the University of North Carolina that its professors are woefully underpaid and deserve a large pay increase at the expense of the general public. The complaint isn’t necessarily farcical on its face. Given the existence of a state-owned university, it is certainly important for the institution to attract and retain quality personnel who can deliver its services effectively. Sorry to break it to the perpetual Peter Pans of the political world, for whom this fact seems so icky, but government universities are in constant competition with other government, nonprofit, and for-profit providers of education and research. Among other goods, they compete for talent. And among the variables that shape this competition is the compensation package.

The problem is that UNC officials have for years both overstated the risk of losing valuable personnel to higher-paid jobs and understated the real value of the compensation their faculty members receive. As an example of the first problem, the UNC-Chapel Hill executive associate provost in charge of faculty hiring and retention (!), Stephen Allred, recently told Triangle Business Journal that between 60 and 100 faculty members are recruited by other schools in an average year. Just over half of those faculty members choose to remain at UNC-CH. While the loss of any particular academic standout might be painful or costly to some, it’s rather hard to get exercised about this situation when you realize that we’re talking about roughly 1.5 percent of UNC-CH’s faculty being successfully recruited by other schools in a given year. Indeed, the turnover rate of professors appears to be substantially lower than that for most other professions – which, given the existence of tenure and the attractiveness of campus life, shouldn’t be all that surprising.

As to the matter of faculty-pay comparisons, it is meaningless to look at data on salary and benefits without factoring in differences in cost of living, even if you have to use rough estimates. The Triangle area has experienced a significant run-up in housing prices and other costs, to be sure, but it is still far less expensive to live here than in other communities with major universities such as the San Francisco Bay Area, New York, Chicago, or most Northeastern communities.

The Pope Center for Higher Education has just published its latest faculty-compensation rankings, adjusted for cost of living. Out of 91 research universities, UNC-Chapel Hill ranked between 23rd and 29th, depending on the level of professor, and always above the mean. Most other UNC campuses compare favorably to their peers in faculty pay, as well, although the report’s author, Jon Sanders, did find a few counterexamples:

• UNC-Asheville is below average for its peer group at all levels.
• North Carolina A&T State is below average for full professors and associate professors.
• North Carolina State and Elizabeth City State are below average for full professors only.

Given scarce resources, it seems clear than North Carolina state government has higher budgetary priorities at the moment that devoting substantial dollars to across-the-board pay increases for UNC faculty. By any measure, for example, instructors in North Carolina’s community-college system are woefully underpaid, near the bottom by national standards, and the results are unfortunately evident in turnover and the quality of instruction. The state’s roads and bridges are inadequate to handle traffic and in some cases in a dangerous state of disrepair. The state’s mental-health reforms appear to need additional dollars to fulfill the promise of community-based services as alternatives to state psychiatric hospitals. The list goes on.

Because of sports and alumni connections, universities are a flamboyant lobby that gets a lot of attention. That may make them one of the squeakier wheels of state government, but that doesn’t make them insufficiently oleaginous.

Hood is president of the John Locke Foundation.