WHAT'S OUR PURPOSE? The Washington Monthly has issued its own college rankings, which they offer as the anti-U.S. News.

Of the top 10 national universities in the 2006 rankings of U.S. News, only two, Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, make it onto our top 10. Harvard, first with Princeton on the U.S. News list, occupies only 28th place on our list, mainly because it's weak on national service. MIT takes first place, while four state schools take spots two through five: the University of California, Berkeley; Pennsylvania State, University Park; University of California, Los Angeles; and Texas A&M University.

Their ranking algorithm, which they are a bit coy about, values a number of attributes that U.S. News does not.

Emory, 20th on the list of U.S. News, comes in at 96th on our list. It ranks lowest on our list of any of the U.S. News top 25, and it's a full 42 spots behind runner-up Carnegie Mellon. Its social mobility score puts it at 104th place. (Its number of Pell recipients is low, its SAT scores are relatively high, yet its graduation is relatively low.) By spending its money on recruiting applicants with high SAT scores (a way of boosting one's U.S. News ranking) Emory has apparently decided reaching out to poorer students is a low priority. Nor does it do especially well in public service or research. That's not great for a school with an endowment of $4.5 billion, the eighth-highest in the nation. Boo, Emory.

The rankings view the California publics and the Big 10 favorably.

But what do the national university rankings tell us about the Illinois publics and the Mid-American? Illinois-Chicago comes in at 92nd, just above Emory (on an aggregate score basis; how different are the individual index entries?) Kent State leads the Mid-American at 56th, just ahead of Iowa. Same question. Illinois State is at 141, Southern Illinois 160, Northern Illinois 180. How different are the aggregate scores and the individual index entries? No doubt we will hear from our office of institutional research.

It's also tough to act on an urban mission. Wayne State is 204 and Wisconsin-Milwaukee 243. Does it console anybody that onetime public elite college aspirant Oakland is 244th and Alaska-Fairbanks is Feedlebaum? What do those rankings say either about the Monthly's weighting of outreach to poorer students or Milwaukee's efforts to become more of a research university in the Madison mold?