What’s New
U.S. News & World Report’s annual “Best Medical Schools” lists were published on Tuesday, and, for the first time, the schools don’t have ordinal ranks. Instead, they’re organized into four tiers. Within each tier, the schools are listed in alphabetical order.
Although some rankings critics have touted tiers as a better alternative to ordinal ranks, U.S. News analysts don’t appear to agree, necessarily. Instead, it seems as if “Best Medical Schools: Research” and “Best Medical Schools: Primary Care” are tiered this year because too many schools didn’t supply the magazine’s analysts with the data they needed to create rankings.
(Language in materials provided to journalists suggested U.S. News analysts see the tiers as a second-best solution. “A comparative rating of participating schools is more informative than having no listing at all,” they wrote in a description of their methodology.)
The Details
Twenty percent of last year’s top-100 medical schools for research and primary care didn’t return U.S. News’s statistical survey this year. Schools that didn’t fill out the survey are listed as unranked. Among them are some of the country’s best-known doctor-training programs, such as Harvard University’s, the Johns Hopkins University’s, and the University of Pennsylvania’s.
“To help with transparency and evaluation, our editors produced an article for students to identify where the currently unranked schools ranked last year,” a spokesperson for U.S. News wrote in an email.
Another notable change this year was that U.S. News analysts dropped reputational surveys from their assessment of medical schools. In November 2023, Robert Morse, U.S. News’s chief of education rankings, announced that reputation measures wouldn’t appear in the medical-school methodology because “recent data indicates that many residency-program directors do not consider medical-school reputation in residency matching and instead focus on individual metrics such as [test] scores, research, and letters of recommendation.”
Finally, because U.S. News’s lists of best medical schools for specialities, such as anesthesiology, family medicine, and surgery, are based entirely on reputational surveys, those lists are now gone.
The Backdrop
In November 2022, the deans of some prominent law schools announced they would stop cooperating with U.S. News. Medical schools followed. The magazine relies heavily on schools to provide data for various rankings lists.
But rankings create “perverse incentives” and “unintended consequences,” George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School, wrote in an announcement in early 2023. Schools may “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,” he wrote.
Asked in June 2024 about plans for this year’s U.S. News rankings, a spokesperson for Harvard Medical School confirmed that the withdrawal from U.S. News was intended to be permanent.
Last year, for its 2023-24 “Best Medical Schools” publications, U.S. News assigned ordinal rankings for nonsubmitting schools anyway. This year the publication still has ranks for “Most Diverse Medical Schools,” which are calculated from the percentage of each school’s student body that identifies as a racial minority underrepresented in medical schools, such as Black, Hispanic, and American Indian.
What to Watch For
The next big rankings U.S. News is set to publish are the undergraduate-program lists, which are perhaps its best known and most closely watched. Those typically come out in the fall.
Could the undergraduate lists, too, end up tiered because of a lack of data? Last year, at least, those responsible for submitting undergraduate-related numbers to U.S. News seemed to have less of an appetite for rebellion than law- and medical-school deans did. Few defected. In addition, U.S. News analysts said they would rank nonsubmitters anyway, and they changed their undergraduate-program methodology to make it less reliant on colleges’ submitting data voluntarily.
