It's surprising to me that, even following the exodus of schools and articles explaining their reasoning for the curtailed association with US News, that the online discussion on this site consistently centers on a single piece of the larger picture.
While the correlation between student admission scores and SES are an important component of our consideration of the societal impact of magnifying academic benchmarks in medical school admissions, and while there may be an association between a medical school's desire for score inflation and placing higher in a ranking system, it is at most one indirect outcome of our adoption of this ranking system. There are much more direct reasons, which have been known for years, for why the ranking system is not only flawed, but at its core an abject failure of its intended purpose.
I can't help but think that the emphasis on scores are a reflection of the people reading it: anxious pre-meds, outside reactionary and sensational news/political pundits, and admissions officers whose work center around student applications, and for whom issues with statistical methodology, mischaracterization of the research enterprise, and graduate
outcomes - rather than student
input to a school - are beyond their focus.
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Here is a shift in the Overtone window -
from an objective standpoint, the US News Ranking methodology is terrible by every indication. They refuse to change it, so schools refused to continue working with them.
This has been known for years by one of the most scientifically-inclined professions on this earth, yet we have adopted and retained this system as a nagging, background component of our field for the last couple decades because of cultural momentum and the fallibility of the human ego. These are base psychological drives, not scientific ones.
i have gone into depth for all of the reasons why this is so in many previous posts. I've provided some resources below for any who want to read more. In brief (i.e., very brief, because this list and its expansion could go on for quite some time):
1. US News polls data from medical school deans, and department chairs/PD directors for a
"reputation" score with horrifically abysmal response rates. Not only this, but they pool from only 3 specialities (likely, again, because they get horrifically abysmal response rates. They likely prefer it - it is much less data to sort through). This leads to almost no confidence that the opinions of your sample group actually depicts the population you are attempting to represent - and for a measure that is inherently subjective to begin with (McGhahie et al., 2001; 2019).
2.
Federal research dollars is the largest component of the ranking system (the "research" category).
They flip-flop between considering federal NIH vs. affiliate/private organization funding in their estimate per year to vary the list, despite nothing at all changing about programs to increase or reduce the merits of their program. The NYU debacle is only symptomatic of a much larger issue.
3. There is
little data to suggest that the strength of the research enterprise correlates with clinical outcomes. In fact, US News ranking has no correlation with clinical competency measured in residents post-graduation (Tsugawa et al., 2018).
4.
Regarding research competency, there is no data provided on student outcomes for a school as a factor in their methodology. These data are not only readily available, but a group of physicians decided to show that this can be done in their off-time by publishing a paper compiling 60+ years of graduate outcomes from over 120 medical schools to assemble an alternate, research-specific ranking methodology (Goldstein et al., 2015).
The US News system fails, from its very design, to effectively measure "the best medical schools" clinically, or in research. Yes, there are better alternatives. No, they do not want to adopt them.
Sources:
1.
Deans: Dump that USNWR 'best medical school' survey
2.
Association between physician US News & World Report medical school ranking and patient outcomes and costs of care: observational study
3.
America's Best Medical Schools: A Critique of the: U.S.... : Academic Medicine
4.
America’s Best Medical Schools: A Renewed Critique of the... : Academic Medicine
5.
What Makes a Top Research Medical School? A Call for a New... : Academic Medicine