<p>
</p>
<p>True enough.
According to Bankrate.com’s COL calculator, $190,000 in Chicago (the average UofC full professor’s salary cited in your link) would be comparable to $157,000 in the Durham NC area. So, at ~$163K, a full professor at Duke would in fact be bringing in slightly higher real income than his counterparts at Chicago. </p>
<p>How do these differences play out in real life competition for the best faculty? Hard to say. It’s true, there are many issues with college rankings and the statistics that drive them. So at best they are a useful starting point for identifying clusters of peer schools before you dig deep into the kind of sources cspan suggests (college newspaper, etc.) </p>
<p>But you do have to dig. Based on the admissions office hype and web site boilerplate alone, you might think any number of colleges have world class faculty, highly competitive admissions, award-winning programs, cutting-edge research, etc. Rankings and statistics can help expose more-or-less significant differences beneath the hype. Then it’s up to you to decide which differences matter. Between Penn, Duke and Chicago? No, I don’t see very significant differences in these numbers.</p>