Thanks for alerting us to those rankings. I spent a good bit of time looking over the USN&WR rankings today and my opinion of medical schools rankings has not changed: criteria is everything. Here are my thoughts.
If you look at the methodology, reputation constitutes 40% of the weight. Immediately, osteopathic medical schools are at a disadvantage because reputation is largely based on a medical school's research production -- which has never been the focus (for good or bad) of osteopathic medical schools.
The fact that any osteopathic medical schools were represented in the primary care rankings surprises me (solely because of the criteria used in the rankings), and yet there were four. Explanation? Well, one possible explanation might be that the other aspects of the schools were strong enough to compensate for the very poor reputation score each osteopathic school received. (This is just a theory -- we can't make any definitive conclusions). But one thing remains clear: those four osteopathic schools appeared in the top 50 primary care schools while 78 other M.D. schools failed to take those spots from them.
There was one other observation I found interesting. Since reputation was based on survey data, I wonder about the negative bias towards osteopathic institutions based solely on their "osteopathic" nature. As we all know, Michigan State University (MSU) has both an M.D. school (MSUCHM) and a D.O. school (MSUCOM) on the same campus. It is my understanding that some of classes are even combined. Well interestingly, both MSUCOM and MSUCHM appear in the top 50 primary care schools. MSUCHM is ranked 23rd, and MSUCOM is ranked 31st. Yet take a close look at their stats. MSUCOM has a slightly higher GPA but slightly lower MCAT -- so the acceptance stats even out pretty well. Across the board, the stats are surprisingly similar, except in one area: reputation. In some areas of reputation there is almost a 60 point difference in the reputation between the two schools. That difference might suggest just how subjective (and therefore prone to bias) the reputation ranking is. After all, these schools are located on the same campus and the students share some of the same classes and facilities.
Bias? We can't say because the survey wasn't designed to answer that question and we certainly cannot infer cause and effect from this ranking.
Any comments?
[This message has been edited by Gregory Gulick (edited 03-20-99).]