More Medical Schools Pull Out of U.S. News Ranking
Last week, we reported that Harvard Medical School has decided to pull out of the U.S. News and World Report rankings. This week, following in their footsteps, several other medical schools including Stanford Medical School, Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, Penn’s Perelman School of Medicine, and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai have also decided to stop submitting their data to the publication.
In a statement issued to the press, J. Larry Jameson, dean of UPenn medical school stated that the rankings "perpetuate a vision for medical education and the future physician and scientist workforce that we do not share.” He went on to criticize the metrics of the data that U.S. News uses to rank the schools. And he is not alone.
In the past year, multiple schools, both undergraduate programs and law schools, have stopped submitting data to the publication for the purpose of the rankings. Their respective statements on the matter all focus on the same point: that the data used to rank the schools do not reflect the priorities of the institution in question.
Other common criticisms of the ranking system range from accusations of racism to acknowledging that the rankings force schools to provide financial aid to top students rather than students in financial need.
As schools continue to pull out of the ranking system, it will be interesting to see how U.S. News will proceed. So far, they continue to rank the schools using data from external sources. The publication released a statement issued in response to the schools pulling out and the respective criticisms stating, “Where students attend school and how they use their education are among the most critical decisions of their life, and with admissions more competitive and less transparent, and tuition increasingly expensive, we believe students deserve access to all the data and information necessary to make the right decision.” Their mention of transparency is particularly ironic here as the publication is not very transparent about where their external data is coming from. Remember, Columbia University fell from the No. 2 spot to No. 19 in a single year while making no changes to their curriculum, staff, or institution in general. So we would be interested in knowing where they are getting their data.
Perhaps, moving forward, U.S. News will reevaluate the emphasis they put on certain metrics. Or, at the very least, maybe they will be more transparent about where their external data comes from. For now, however, we expect that more schools will continue to pull out of the rankings. Check back for updates as we will continue to publish information as it is released.
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