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After Law-School Revolt, Harvard Medical School Will Stop Cooperating With ‘U.S. News’ Rankings

By  Francie Diep
January 17, 2023
Harvard Medical School in Boston on April 30, 2021.
David L. Ryan, The Boston Globe, Getty Images
Harvard Medical School

Harvard Medical School’s dean announced on Tuesday that the institution would no longer send data to U.S. News & World Report for its annual rankings.

“As unintended consequences, rankings create perverse incentives for institutions to report misleading or inaccurate data, set policies to boost rankings rather than nobler objectives, or divert financial aid from students with financial need to high-scoring students with means in order to maximize ranking criteria,” the dean, George Q. Daley, wrote in a message

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Harvard Medical School’s dean announced on Tuesday that the institution would no longer send data to U.S. News & World Report for its annual rankings.

“As unintended consequences, rankings create perverse incentives for institutions to report misleading or inaccurate data, set policies to boost rankings rather than nobler objectives, or divert financial aid from students with financial need to high-scoring students with means in order to maximize ranking criteria,” the dean, George Q. Daley, wrote in a message to the medical-school community.

The move suggests that institutional protest of the magazine’s ubiquity in higher education may be far from over. Two months ago, deans of top-ranked law schools began announcing they would stop cooperating with U.S. News. Soon after, former deans of the University of Chicago’s School of Medicine published an op-ed in STAT that urged leaders of top medical schools to do the same. Daley wrote that the law-school protest had “compelled” him to act.

Like Daley, many of the withdrawing law deans cited concerns about how the rankings’ methodology discourages schools from accepting lower-income students. Ultimately two dozen law deans said they wouldn’t cooperate anymore, according to the New York Law Journal. After the law-school revolt, U.S. News promised changes in its methodology.

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Daley was not available for an interview, but his message suggests an algorithm change may not be enough to entice him to start working with U.S. News again. “Educational leaders have long criticized the methodology used by USNWR to assess and rank medical schools,” he wrote. “However, my concerns and the perspectives I have heard from others are more philosophical than methodological.” Rankings can’t tell individual students if a school will be a good fit for them, “no matter the methodology,” he wrote.

U.S. News did not respond directly to a request for comment on Daley’s announcement. In the past, its editors have said they will continue to rank schools that don’t cooperate, using publicly available data. In a statement late Tuesday, U.S. News’s chief executive, Eric Gertler, said in part that “millions of prospective students annually visit U.S. News medical-school rankings because we provide students with valuable data and solutions.”

U.S. News has two “Best Medical Schools” lists. Harvard ranks No. 1 on the “Best Medical Schools: Research” list and No. 9 on “Best Medical Schools: Primary Care.”

Update (Jan. 17, 2023, 4:57 p.m.): This article has been updated with comment from Eric Gertler, chief executive of U.S. News & World Report.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Admissions & EnrollmentAccess & Affordability
Francie Diep
Francie Diep is a senior reporter covering money in higher education. Email her at francie.diep@chronicle.com.
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