I have a thought/question, with presumably many top schools soon to follow suite, how do you think this is going to affect Residency competitiveness?
With step 1 going P/F, people are saying that this "kicked the can" further down the road to where PDs have one less metric by which to judge folks, so that it was plausible for school ranking to have been more of an influence.
This seems like it could be a pre-empt to thwart that, but inevitably something else will kick the can down further to something else.
However, it's unlikely anyone will forget that Harvard et al are the "elite" schools so. Perhaps this withdraw won't have any real effect.
I don’t think the PD’s use the exact ranking as a metric, ie No. 3 is better than No.10. Rather a group of schools historically enjoy the boost from their perceived prestige. I doubt this list will change when schools drop out of US News. What’s gonna happen is that the consensus of which schools are T5 and which schools are t10 will be more stable. I think it’s more of a tier system.
Tier 1a: HMS, UCSF, Hopkins, Stanford and Penn
Tier 1b: Columbia, WashU, Yale, Duke, Mayo and Michigan
Tier 2: NYU, Cornell, Pitt, UW, UCLA, UCSD, Vandy, Northwestern, Chicago and Mt Sinai.
Tier 3: BU, Emory, and the like
I don’t think within the same tier, the reputation differs at all among the schools. So in a way, US News ranking is artificially granular.