Is there a list of how residencies rank the strengths of med schools? The methodology mentioned a 1-5 scale. Can we see what schools are at the top, for example? Is this something I would be able to see if I paid the USNEWS premium membership thingymagig?
There is a "program director" rank in the US News research ranking, but it's kind of stupid because it lumps specialties together and doesn't really weight program directors in terms of prevalence of residency slots. It just picks a random sampling of a handful of fields and has them rank schools, but probably is not reflective of other PDs and not how a particular specialty would vote, so pretty useless. (Not to mention that many of these PDs will no longer be PDs in 4 years when their personal opinions might matter to you.) I mean what do you care if your school is liked by pathologists and psychiatrists if you hope to go into ortho. It thus doesn't reflect how residency selection works (ie by specialty) and thus is absolutely useless.
The US News puts together two sets of rankings. The "research" ranking which is heavilly driven by NIH grant levels, and the primary care ranking, which is basically a consolation prize ranking, in that schools that don't do well on the research ranking sometimes can save face by saying, "but we did much better on the primary care ranking". The primary care ranking has a lot of DO schools ranked well, and a lot of the big name places ranked poorly, and is basically not used by anybody for anything because it doesn't really show that places do anything better in terms of training folks for primary care, just that a lot more people go into it at some places. The research ranking, because it is driven by funding, is sometimes deemed a substitute for prestige, I guess from the notion that the prestigious programs are the ones who are better funded (a lot of times this is true). Because there are no tiers to med schools, and no other ranking systems that med students can rely on, they look to the US news research ranking, largely because they are flailing around in the dark, desperate to be able to say they went to someplace impressive, but poorly situated to judge, so the US News gets a lot of play and a lot of people break up the rankings into their own, ad hoc tiers. Pre-allo folks will use the research rankings, we all did, simply because we lack actual, useful, data.
However the problem with these rankings is that because they focus on factors that don't affect most med students day to day life, they aren't really telling you anything helpful. They don't tell you which places are "better". They don't tell you which one is going to get you that derm residency. They don't tell you whether the school is going to train you well for the next level. They do tell you that the program has research funding, but even that could be a lot of funding to some PhD who works off campus who you will never come across in your 4 years. So it's kind of silly rankings. It's not a ranking of the "best" med schools although US News bills it as such. It's a ranking of criteria US News finds easy to measure and marginally related to prestige.
In terms of residency, there is no ranking of residency programs, and no real way to know which residencies in various fields like which med schools. In fact, you usually see residencies liking places not based on a perceived rank, but because residents they got from there in a prior year did well, or because they feel folks are decently trained, and thus won't require as much handholding. And it only matters by specialty, because each specialty runs very independently -- there is no consensus between ortho and rads and derm and psych etc as to which med schools are better than which, and they don't work together or have very common notions of what they deem useful in their program, so by grouping fields like this in any strange proportion like US news does doesn't give you much useful info -- it simply doesn't provide you the info that might be useful to making a decision. If they did it specialty by specialty that would be more useful, perhaps. But heck, you won't even know what field you are going to go into until you get through your rotations so it doesn't matter that much now.
So in short, there are research rankings which slightly reflect prestige, but no rank that reflects quality or suggests future success. And no tier system exists other than what one might make on their own based on the US News Research ranking. So folks often lop off the top 20 ranked schools and call it top tier, but there's no science behind it.
