This week on our Karr on Culture podcast: What does it take to be the best university in the country -- advantages or merit? (http://www.pbs.org/wnet/need-to-know/files/2010/05/karronculture-badge.gif)Last month, Washington Monthly (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/) magazine published its annual ranking of the top colleges and universities in the U.S. The list looked almost nothing like the more commonly-cited one published annually by U.S. News and World Report (http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/): Washington Monthly named the University of California San Diego (http://ucsd.edu/) the best in the country; it ranks 35th on the U.S. News list. Six of the schools in the top 10 are public institutions (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrill_Land-Grant_Colleges_Act); the top state school on the U.S. News list (UC Berkeley (http://berkeley.edu/)) landed in 35th place. And Harvard (http://harvard.edu/) ranks ninth; it's traditionally at the top of the U.S. News rankings. Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris discusses the methods that led to these conclusions -- and explains how the conventional wisdom reflects our misplaced priorities with regard to higher ed. UCSD sociologist John Skrentny (http://dss.ucsd.edu/~jskrentn/) talks about the differences between the students he teaches now, those he knew as a Harvard grad student, and his classmates as an undergraduate at Indiana University (http://indiana.edu/) (128th in Washington Monthly's rankings; 75th in U.S. News) -- and considers what it tells us about meritocracy in America. (Full disclosure: Rick Karr attended Purdue University (http://www.purdue.edu/) as an undergrad -- 83rd in Washington Monthly, 56th in U.S. News. His graduate college, The London School of Economics and Political Science (http://www2.lse.ac.uk/home.aspx) -- was not ranked by either magazine.)