When weighing medical schools, Hannah Gewaid admits that she kept the annual rankings from U.S. News & World Report in mind. “If I could get into a school of higher prestige, then I could have better odds for a good residency placement,” the pre-med student at the University of California, San Diego, told this news organization.
Although Ms. Gewaid considered other factors, she ultimately chose the highest-ranked medical school to which she was accepted: Rocky Vista University, Ivins, Utah. But it was the school’s environment that appealed to her most, she said. “Medical school can be pretty cut-throat, and I felt like the community at Rocky Vista was supportive. They also have one of the highest pass rates for boards in the nation, so it felt like the right combination for me.”
Likewise, Ramie Fathy, MD, a PGY1 internal medicine resident at Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, considered the report’s rankings when applying to medical schools. He chose the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, which ranked fifth in the nation at the time, and graduated a year ago.
In January, Harvard Medical School pulled out of the popular U.S. News rankings that many students use to guide their application decisions. Soon afterwards,
Although Dr. Fathy doesn’t regret selecting Perelman before it joined the list of exiting schools, he wonders if he was shortsighted using the rankings as criteria. “It’s hard to know what makes a school unique from others, and the rankings serve as a metric to guide you,” he said. “But in the end, it’s not a reliable or reflective way to judge a school.”
Dr. Fathy said he is proud that Perelman opted out of the rankings: “I think it will help ensure that they prioritize what is best for the students and the quality of their training, rather than aspects that are relevant to rankings but don’t translate to a better overall student experience.”
Dr. Fathy’s viewpoint seems to be shared by the medical schools that announced they will no longer participate in the U.S. News rankings. The Association of American Medical Colleges recently reported that more than a dozen of the top 20 medical schools in the 2023 report have publicly exited the rankings.
USNWR’s chairman and CEO Eric Gertler said in a prepared statement that students turn to the rankings for help in making a key career decision in the face of competitive admissions and high tuition costs.
“We know that comparing diverse academic institutions across a common data set is challenging, and that is why we have consistently stated that the rankings should be one component in a prospective student’s decision-making process.”
The schools’ reasons for exiting vary. In Harvard’s case, Dean George Q. Daley, MD, PhD, said in a statement that the rankings don’t align with the school’s high standards of the school’s medical education programs.
Critics of the rankings say they rely too much on the grades and test scores of accepted students, AAMC reported. Stanford Dean, Lloyd Minor, MD, said the rankings fail to “capture the full extent of what makes an exceptional learning environment.” A school’s mission, curriculum, and other metrics should also be used to judge educational value, he said.
Medical schools that publicly announced their decisions to withdraw from the rankings also pointed to the extensive time and resources needed to gather data to submit to USNWR, rise in the standings, and remain at the top.
Bryan Carmody, MD, a Norfolk, Va.-based pediatric nephrologist and pediatrics professor known for his medical school commentaries, said in an interview that he doesn’t see the value of the rankings. “If you look at the data and factors the report collects, it has almost no impact on the day-to-day experience and quality of the medical school. It doesn’t assess meaningful educational outputs.”
Using MCAT scores and the GPAs of incoming students is irrelevant to the value the school can provide a student, Dr. Carmody said.
“The stated idea of the rankings is to measure quality, but in reality, it’s to maintain a certain hierarchy,” he said. “The content of the MCAT is only peripherally relevant. Real patients don’t come in as a multiple-choice question.”
The withdrawal of Harvard – which held the top ranking – put the report’s shortcomings in the spotlight, Dr. Carmody said. But Harvard wasn’t the first to pull out. In 2016, the Uniformed Services University in Maryland exited the rankings. Some schools chose never to participate, including most Historically Black Colleges and Universities, as well as osteopathic medical schools.
Given the ripple effect of high-ranking schools like Harvard pulling out of the rankings, prospective students are left to find other criteria to measure their future med schools.