U.S. News Previews Top Med Schools After Major Players Ditch the Rankings

Editor's Note: On April 21, U.S. News removed its preview of this year's top medical schools from its website.

In the wake of a number of top medical schools withdrawing from the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings, the outlet has released a preview of this year's highest performers before the entire list is announced on April 18.

Rounding out the top three medical schools for research this year are Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the University of Pennsylvania's Perelman School of Medicine in Philadelphia, and Harvard University in Boston, respectively.

As of this year, Johns Hopkins was continuing to submit information to U.S. News for the rankings, while Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania had announced their plans to no longer do so.

A decampment of a number of medical schools from the rankings has closely followed that of a number of top law schools, and U.S. News simultaneously rolled out a preview of that list, as well.

As for the outlet's decision to release a preview of this year's highest performers in a departure from its procedure in years prior, Eric Gertler, CEO of U.S. News, told MedPage Today in an email that "we are releasing these previews now to share the top 14 schools in the two categories that have gotten the most attention in the media, which represent approximately 10% of their respective student populations. We will release the complete graduate schools rankings on April 18, at which point we hope the attention will be focused on those schools that represent the remaining 90% of students seeking to make the best choice for their legal and/or medical education."

In an email to MedPage Today, a spokesperson for Johns Hopkins wrote that "Johns Hopkins Medicine is aware of the posting of a preview of the 2023-2024 U.S. News & World Report Graduate School rankings in which Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine is ranked as #1. In January 2023, we -- along with many peer institutions across the country -- made the decision to no longer participate in U.S. News & World Report's annual Best Medical Schools rankings."

"At the time of our decision, we had already submitted data for the rankings," the spokesperson noted, "however, we will not be doing so in the foreseeable future. This decision was driven by increasing concerns among medical schools about the publication's methodology and concerns that the ranking system does not provide a fair, comprehensive overview of each medical school, but instead employs metrics that are not clearly useful to students who seek relevant information to help them make choices about their medical education, and do not fully account for the many factors that distinguish one medical school from another."

U.S. News said that changes to the 2023-2024 "Best Medical Schools: Research" methodology include the following:

• The addition of NIH Grant Awards as a measure of research quality
• An increase in the weight of faculty-student ratios
• A reduction in overall weight of reputation surveys
• A reduction in MCAT and GPA scores

The outlet added that full methodology weights and measures will be available on April 18. It also addressed the departure of a number of medical schools from the annual rankings.

"Earlier this year, some medical schools chose not to provide their institution's statistical data to U.S. News," the outlet said. "In order to ensure that students had a fair basis for comparison, U.S. News used data from submitted statistical surveys in 2023 (or 2022 if 2023 was not available), and included publicly available metrics from the National Institutes of Health."

As Harvard led the pack in withdrawing from the rankings earlier this year, it credited its law school for helping to make that decision. George Q. Daley, MD, PhD, dean of the faculty of medicine, detailed that the decision was "more philosophical than methodological."

At the same time, a number of hospitals associated with some of the medical schools that have withdrawn pointed to inherent differences between the annual U.S. News "Best Hospitals" rankings, which are typically released in the summer, and the "Best Medical Schools" rankings.

Even so, U.S. News announced in February that it will make adjustments to the methodologies used to determine its "Best Hospitals" and "Best Children's Hospitals" rankings.

The rankings will assign more weight to clinical outcomes and other objective measures of quality, and less weight to the outlet's opinion survey of physicians, said Ben Harder, managing editor and chief of health analysis at U.S. News, in an online post at the time.

It remains to be seen what further changes may occur in the annual rankings, and whether more institutions will follow suit in declining to participate moving forward.

"We know how difficult it is to be a student searching for comparable information, and we will continue to incorporate data that medical schools reported directly to U.S. News over the past 2 years on the U.S. News' rankings and school profile pages, including indicators not used in the ordinal rankings and other critical information," the outlet said.

"More data on schools benefits everyone. U.S. News remains committed to collecting more data on the metrics that matter most to students in future iterations of our rankings," the outlet added.

The full preview list of this year's top medical schools is as follows:

1. Johns Hopkins University

2. University of Pennsylvania (Perelman)

3. Harvard University

4. University of California San Francisco (tie)

4. Washington University in St. Louis (tie)

6. Columbia University

7. Stanford University (tie)

7. Yale University (tie)

9. Duke University (tie)

9. University of Michigan-Ann Arbor (tie)

11. University of Pittsburgh

12. Northwestern University (Feinberg)

13. New York University (Grossman)

14. Cornell University (Weill) (tie)

14. Mayo Clinic School of Medicine (Alix) (tie)

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