U.S. News Revamps Medical School Rankings for 2024

The new medical school rankings from U.S. News & World Report just came out, and there’s a tie for the top spot — a 16-way tie, that is.

Not included among those 16 are stalwarts such as Harvard Medical School, Stanford Medical School, and the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Responding to pushback from the medical community, U.S. News reworked its rankings methodology for medical schools and this time churned out a list featuring “tiers,” not actual rankings. The magazine also left unranked several high-profile medical schools because of missing data.

Is this a good compromise or a cop-out?

U.S. News made its bones ranking colleges and graduate schools along an ordinal scale, definitively declaring who was No. 1, No. 2, and so forth. Readers could discover statistical differences between, say, the fifth- and ninth-ranked national liberal arts colleges and determine if and how they’re meaningful.

Not anymore, at least with medical schools. Instead, U.S. News has opted to “rank” schools according to tiers. Within the “research” category, for example, we find 16 medical schools listed in the top tier. All are named alphabetically.

Tier 2 includes 36 medical schools.

In the “primary care” category, 14 make the top tier, while 35 are listed within Tier 2.

You might, then, deduce that Tier 1 schools are “better” than Tier 2 schools, but that’s about all these rankings tell you.

The lists also include several “unranked” institutions, which follow Tier 4. Among the unranked medical schools are those at Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Duke University, Harvard, Georgetown University, New York University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Pennsylvania (Penn).

In other words, many of the most highly regarded medical schools in the nation.

Last year, U.S. News ranked Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Penn as the top three research-based medical schools. Now they’re unranked and relegated to the bottom of the list.

That’s because those institutions, along with the others in the “unranked” category, failed to submit data to U.S. News. In fact, according to The Chronicle of Higher Education, 20% of the medical schools U.S. News ranked in the top 100 last year didn’t submit the data U.S. News requested.

A lack of data hasn’t stopped U.S. News from ranking colleges. When colleges don’t submit the required information, the magazine turns to the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) and the Common Data Set to fill in the blanks.

And in “infrequent cases when data for a ranking factor [is] not available to U.S. News at all,” the magazine’s website admits, “U.S. News impute[s] values depending upon circumstance.”

Translation: They guess.

With medical schools, however, data relating to student GPAs and MCAT scores, schools’ acceptance rates, and other relevant measures aren’t readily available, the magazine points out.

In fact, so desperate for data was U.S. News that it offered to award “transparency credit to institutions who submit the U.S. News statistical survey and/or include that information on their school’s website for academic year 2023-2024 for prospective students to access.”

It’s not entirely clear what a “transparency credit” meant for participating institutions and if such credit boosted a medical school’s ranking.

Yet a dearth of data didn’t stop U.S. News from ranking medical schools ordinally last year.

For this year, the magazine evidently figured it was easier and maybe more ethical to assign tier rankings rather than parse institutions in light of missing data. While not addressing the move to tiers per se, its website says changes in methodology result from conversations with medical school deans and other professionals.

Another notable change is the exclusion of reputational rankings from its formula because “many residency program directors do not consider medical school reputation in residency matching.”

Perhaps a second reason it dropped reputational rankings is that fewer schools are completing surveys.

Last year, several top medical schools joined together in boycotting U.S. News rankings, refusing to submit surveys and data to the magazine. Schools such as Harvard, one of the early boycotters, cited problems with the magazine’s misguided assumptions related to admissions criteria and career choices.

“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,” wrote George Q. Daley, dean of Harvard Medical School.

Without enough surveys, U.S. News discontinued rankings for medical specialties such as anesthesiology and surgery. Those rankings were based exclusively on survey data.

Readers can still find additional information on student diversity and graduate outcomes, including medical schools with the most alumni practicing in areas with shortages of health professionals and in rural communities.

What, if anything, does this shift toward tiers portend for other U.S. News lists? It didn’t affect the 2024 law school rankings methodology much even though law schools similarly began boycotting the magazine last year. Law schools are still ranked ordinally.

The magazine’s bread-and-butter list for undergraduate colleges likely will continue unabated. Few colleges have boycotted rankings despite continued grumblings about the disservice such rankings afford prospective students.

If it did move to a tier-based system for all rankings, it wouldn’t be the first to adopt such a strategy. Money magazine, for instance, uses a “star” system in its rankings, much like Yelp. Top institutions are awarded five stars.

For many prospective medical students, this current iteration of the rankings may offer limited value. What does it mean when 35 institutions are tied for second place? And not having the nation’s top medical schools ranked at all calls into question the validity and utility of these lists.

Then again, students eyeing Harvard or Stanford for medical school don’t need U.S. News to tell them anything about quality.

Moving away from a strict ordinal ranking might placate medical deans and still offer readers some value, so it’s best to consider this a compromise. But there’s little doubt U.S. News would prefer to gather data directly from universities, crunch the numbers, and align institutions accordingly. That’s been its modus operandi all along.

With that option no longer available, this tier system, however enervated, will have to suffice.