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the 102 students does include their 10 MD/PhD students, fwiw.
edit: didn't see @Screamapillar stating this above before posting. Am in full agreement. The 102 adds up with USNWR and MSAR
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edit: didn't see @Screamapillar stating this above before posting. Am in full agreement. The 102 adds up with USNWR and MSAR
Being tuition free probably doesn't hurt NYU.
Glad to see Duke killing the game. Would gladly trade bball for medical school lol.
Glad to see Duke killing the game. Would gladly trade bball for medical school lol.
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deleted555445
looks like UCLA made the opposite choice 🤣
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deleted1099068
I’m honestly confused how year after year, Harvard somehow maintains its #1 position for being a school full of elitist prickwad physicians.
And also how the flying f is UF ranked higher than Miami in the State of Florida. Literally everyone knows Miami is a far superior school, even the great @Icebird can confirm this
And also how the flying f is UF ranked higher than Miami in the State of Florida. Literally everyone knows Miami is a far superior school, even the great @Icebird can confirm this
Yup! Mystery solved. Hopefully, everyone can admit that combining the two different pools, with different admission criteria, different admit rates, and vastly different yields into one number creates bad data. It jumped out here due to the huge variance between what USNWR reported and what the dean was saying, and it was caused by NYU being an outlier with free tuition, but it's true for each and every school.
Hopefully, as a person who spends a lot of time working with numbers, you'll agree that combining 50 admits with a 20% yield with 100 admits with a 66% yield to create a single reported number with a 50% yield is invalid under these circumstances. It creates a misleading picture of just what the MD-only admit rate is, as well as what people's odds are of being called off the WL. USNWR really needs to either strip out the MD-PhD numbers, OR report them separately, since they represent an entirely separate applicant pool. JMHO, as someone who uses the numbers and is not yet an applicant.
I second this question.
Hahahaha thank you! I think I asked at a bad time 😂
Close. Sounds like NYU mdphd had 50 admits with 20% yield netting 10 matriculants and 150 md admits with 66% yield netting 100 matriculants.
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deleted1065184
I'm still curious about this lol...still not understanding the combination.
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deleted1065184
My guess would be that academic medicine, research, and specialty care are more associated with prestige...and let's be real, the only reason anybody (which pretty much only includes premeds, deans, and some parents) cares about the rankings is because of prestige-chasing. So for this reason, people focus much more on the research rankings...even though the methodology sucks.
Yes. This is definitely it. Primary care is kind of looked down upon, since it's what a lot of people do if they can't get a more "competitive," higher paying specialty. As a result, it probably doesn't get the respect it deserves, and certainly doesn't confer the type of prestige people who care about rankings (both applicants and the schools themselves) care about.
As they say on the AT&T commercials, "It's Not Complicated." 🙂
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Because this is SDN where almost everyone wants to match competative specialties and/or big academic centers. People aiming for primary/community practice are not very well represented
Oh I see I think I was misunderstanding what the primary care ranking meant.
Like most parents they tend to be lurkers 🙂
You got the full USNWR rankings for specialties? Particularly internal medicine. Kind of interesting how their first few ranks are divergent from doximity. Also tanking "top" residencies is kind of pointless because they're all pretty wildly different. For instance, stanford puts more evidence on research than clinical training, and IM residents from UTSW are basically cards and pulms fellows when they're done with training from practicing in Parkland Memorial
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lol poor UCLA
i hope people don't choose not to go to UCLA cuz of this year's rankings
that school is (mostly) great and in an unbeatable location
i hope people don't choose not to go to UCLA cuz of this year's rankings
that school is (mostly) great and in an unbeatable location
Coincidental I just watched the Operation Varsity Blues doc on Netflix last night. I love me some peak neuroticism.
It’s ironic that this is now the general sentiment on this site. I was saying the exact same thing 5 years ago when they got a new Dean of Admissions who all of a sudden wanted to play with the big boys (e.g. HMS, Duke, Stanford, Yale, etc.) and upped their MCAT “average” (i.e. cut off) from 30 to 34/35 when the quality of their medical students they were graduating wasn’t anywhere near the aforementioned and other schools. All he cared/cares about is sandbagging numbers, not improving the quality of teaching his students get. Which is disappointing because Langone and Bellevue are exceptional places to train, especially the latter.
I wouldn't really read into rankings at all, and I would especially not read too much into this year. Seems like a lot of methodology shake-up/COVID-related reasons that will probably change/be adjusted for next year.
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deleted87051
I attended NYU from 1988-1992. It’s always been a high stat school. Back then their average MCAT/GPA were the same as Harvard/UCSF/WashU...which were the other highest stat schools. I think NYU students were weaker overall applicants who still had high stats. I had some weak research and no other significant extracurriculars, but a high MCAT and high GPA from a known difficult undergrad. If I got off the waitlist at Columbia and Cornell, I would not have attended NYU. Sorry to hear teaching has declined. The teaching then was amazing, especially medicine rounds at Bellevue.
Also USNWR didn’t rank med schools then. All we had was something called the Gourman Report. NYU was ranked 13 at the time with the usual suspects (Harvard, Hopkins, Columbia, UCSF, WashU, Stanford, Penn, etc) in the top ten.
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Finally, I can decide which school to go to
If it was just MCAT/GPA, this wouldn’t explain the rise in the the quality of their match list and PD rankings.
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deleted1066449
UCSD location will beat it hands down.
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deleted87051
Glad to hear!! It would have been sad if things had changed. I loved my time there and have nothing but appreciation and gratitude for the attendings and residents who taught us, many of whom I thought were bona fide geniuses and savants.
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deleted87051
It’s a matter of taste. There’s more natural beauty around UCSD but the cultural opportunities around UCLA are much better.
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deleted87051
It doesn’t mean anything.
The truth is that there’s zero difference between any of the t20’s in terms of what kind of doctor you can be.
So does physicians, employees, hospital administrators, residents, residency directors, NIH grants reviewers, private grant institutions, donors... lol
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deleted1065184
None of the physicians or residents I know (including my spouse) care at all about rankings. "Employees" is an extremely broad and vague term, so I'm not even sure how to address that. But I can say that almost none of the people I know working at the institution I'm at know anything about the rankings.
Some hospital administrators might know where their school is ranked, but that literally makes no difference to students or physicians. If you ask an NIH grant reviewer (this includes my PI, who I know for a fact doesn't give af about the rankings) or donor what the current USNWR research rankings show, most would have no idea and wouldn't care.
There are surveys of PDs and I believe close to or fewer than half said they care about the school at all (I'll have to double check the percentage)...and of the ones who did, they rated it pretty low in importance (behind things like Step 1 and 2 scores, AOA, letters of support, research, etc). And even then, USNWR research rankings are incredibly volatile and don't even match up well with PD research scores lol.
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I agree with these points - and so does the vast majority of the AAMC. The only reason that the ranking system hasn’t changed already is because of history and momentum; it’s hard to change anything in medicine, no matter the consensus.
The best “ranking” system for research-based medical schools that uses the measures provided above (and others) has actually already been done. Doximity collaborated with some prominent physician scientists a few years back to publish a ranking system method based on actual data of student success in the AAMC official journal. It’s quite good. They pooled all publications, grants, awards, and clinical trials from 700,000 medical graduates of 120+ schools over 60 years to come up with a “Top 25” ranking:
What Makes a Top Research Medical School? A Call for a New... : Academic Medicine
ised the quality of medical education, the educational processes that produce the physicians who provide the best patient care and conduct the best biomedical research have not been identified. Comparative analyses are powerful tools to understand the differences between institutions, but they...
journals.lww.com
As expected, most of the research powerhouses with the highest funding had more successful graduates in research on average. However, notable research schools that performed extremely well relative to the other powerhouses were: UChicago, Rochester, Einstein, and Case Western (i.e., all had grads performing equal or better than programs with greater funding, though this just might show that the difference in funding past a certain threshold - like $200 million - doesn’t really matter much for student opportunity).
I guess the important question is - should any of these rankings actually matter for students selecting between schools, regardless of whether it is much more accurate than the current system? I think that for MD-PhD, yes, this matters to a certain extent. The schools listed have graduates with the strongest outcomes related to careers in biomedical research (which is important, especially regarding the state of academia).
But for the other, vast majority - 98% - of MD students matriculating this summer, very few of which have aspirations for R01’s or generally super research-intensive careers, does this matter at all?
No.
I don’t think it matters in the slightest, and I will never understand why the majority of people here place any importance on it.
Because it's a proxy. If you plot who has the highest GPA/MCAT, who has the highest NIH funding, who has the highest peer and PD reputation, who has the highest ranking residencies...it's the same set of usual suspects. US News just blends it all up into one easy to consume smoothie.
I will say something that should be talked about more is the home field advantage for the attached residencies. An insane number of people (like 1/3 to 1/2) at schools like HMS and Hopkins stay at the affiliated hospitals to train. It's huge to go there for med school if you think you'd train there too.
I think the critical issue with all of these measures has been noted by others above. To summarize:
1.) GPA/MCAT: Academic benchmarks neither correlate with physician quality (indicated through multiple parameters, in multiple studies), nor do they represent any measure of medical school quality. In addition, they are game-able, as median benchmarks among the top 40 NIH funded schools are so similar (3.8 - 3.9; 516-520), that a small push in either mark can result in a “bump” of several rankings that do not reflect any difference in school quality or student outcomes. I know two schools in particular that has used merit-scholarships to game this strategy for several years, and I am sure there are others.
2.) Peer/PD rankings: are based on sample collection that is garbage, by even the most lenient standards of statistics. Most years, they receive less than 30% response rate (some years, even lower than that). Most PD’s of reputable programs have voiced how they ignore the emails/mail they receive containing the surveys. Sample biases: they do not correct for specialty or region, either, and those that have previously submitted surveys are the ones that submit again. Result is that you get almost 0% confidence that your sample reflects the actual population (an achievement, for sure, but not one you want to have).
This is reflected in match outcomes, as well. Several schools with “low-to-middling” PD scores have over half of their graduating classes match into the most competitive residency programs in the country. Several with higher scores have less than half.
3.) Funding: the only measure related to research capacity of a school. If this is of interest to students, it is fine to include. But at the minimum, it should be balanced by the student outcomes data, which is also readily accessible, and provides an actual measure of how a school boosters or impedes their graduates success in medical research (which is of interest to a very small portion of students anyways).
I think the tendency for some to grasp onto rankings isn’t an objective or career-driven one - it is just an innately, flawed, human one. People without fulfillment in their lives through other means try to substitute that with a perceived hierarchy from which to compare themselves to others in. To disrupt that, or at least bring it into line with reality, is to make those people who hold it at the core of their identity feel dissonance.
While this perspective is toxic to people that hold it for several reasons, I think it is even more damaging to the field as a whole. The purpose of the practice becomes less about treatment and the research to find better ones, and more about reaching a status that becomes increasingly impossible to reach.
I think accurate rankings only help if you know what you want, but not necessarily where to find it. Hence, outcomes rankings for MD-PhD students, and those interested in heavy, research intensive careers. But they mean nothing - and are in fact, damaging - to students without a purpose (which are most coming into medical school).
Consider this - if they had conducted a survey before the existance of US News with 100% response rate asking only "what are the best medical schools?"
I'd bet my life savings HMS, Hopkins, Penn, UCSF, Stanford, WashU etc would be the most named. People like to credit US News with creating opinion but they didn't, they tried to capture something that already existed. Same with colleges. Same with law schools. Same with business schools. Same with hospitals. You get the idea.
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deleted1065184
I've seen this study and I do think it is leaps and bounds better than what USNWR does. One glaring issue is that they don't take into account citations, which is just as important as the number of publications (if not more important). Also, I think your point about whether it matters for the vast majority of students is spot on. Unless you are planning to dedicate 40%+ of your career to research, there's no reason you should really care about how big of a research powerhouse a school is. At most medical schools, students interested in doing research to be more competitive for residency can find that.I agree with these points - and so does the vast majority of the AAMC. The only reason that the ranking system hasn’t changed already is because of history and momentum; it’s hard to change anything in medicine, no matter the consensus.
The best “ranking” system for research-based medical schools that uses the measures provided above (and others) has actually already been done. Doximity collaborated with some prominent physician scientists a few years back to publish a ranking system method based on actual data of student success in the AAMC official journal. It’s quite good. They pooled all publications, grants, awards, and clinical trials from 700,000 medical graduates of 120+ schools over 60 years to come up with a “Top 25” ranking:
What Makes a Top Research Medical School? A Call for a New... : Academic Medicine
ised the quality of medical education, the educational processes that produce the physicians who provide the best patient care and conduct the best biomedical research have not been identified. Comparative analyses are powerful tools to understand the differences between institutions, but they...
As expected, most of the research powerhouses with the highest funding had more successful graduates in research on average. However, notable research schools that performed extremely well relative to the other powerhouses were: UChicago, Rochester, Einstein, and Case Western (i.e., all had grads performing equal or better than programs with greater funding, though this just might show that the difference in funding past a certain threshold - like $200 million - doesn’t really matter much for student opportunity).
I guess the important question is - should any of these rankings actually matter for students selecting between schools, regardless of whether it is much more accurate than the current system? I think that for MD-PhD, yes, this matters to a certain extent. The schools listed have graduates with the strongest outcomes related to careers in biomedical research (which is important, especially regarding the state of academia).
But for the other, vast majority - 98% - of MD students matriculating this summer, very few of which have aspirations for R01’s or generally super research-intensive careers, does this matter at all?
No.
I don’t think it matters in the slightest, and I will never understand why the majority of people here place any importance on it.
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deleted1065184
It wouldn't be surprising if those were the schools listed, but the fact remains that we really just cannot know how well their polling is reflective of the population as a whole. If the ~ 30% of respondents consists of 25% of folks from the West Coast and Northeast, you're always going to get the schools you mention. But what if the South and Midwest just don't care to participate as much? Do you think you'd get the same Top X schools? Maybe, maybe not. We'd probably see Duke, Vandy, UAB, Emory, and UNC pop up more in the South. We'd probably see -(in addition to more WashU)- Michigan, UChicago, Northwestern, and Mayo pop up more in the Midwest.
At the end of the day, none of it really matters tbh. It cannot be ignored that going to a big-name school can raise an eyebrow that might get you a little bit of favor among certain people, but it won't make or break anyone.
So what are your thoughts about the common terminology in other fields like "T14 law" and "M7 business"? These entered people's vocabulary without US News' instruction, and they include schools outside the coasts. The idea that medicine would have something similar is common sense imho.
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deleted1065184
I think those are fields in which name is FAR more important than it is in medicine. And law, for example, is a highly saturated field in which being able to have prestige can help for employment. Medicine isn't like that. The only place where the name really matters at all is in academic medicine (where the pay is less anyway lol), and even then it matters far less than in law and business. But any person who graduates with an MD/DO degree and successfully completes residency will undoubtedly find a job in their field of interest. The same cannot be said for law/business.
I agree - I think including citation counts would help. They weigh the publication number by the journal quality (Using the eigenfactor), but this is a bit more of an indirect way to gauge successful productivity than use of h-indices. Overall, I would say that the ranking system is 90-95% of the way there, and already provides a very useful identification of medical schools with the strongest track records/history (with updates every couple of years, it would also heavily incentivize schools to bolster outcomes of their graduates rather than incoming stats of students - which is the whole point of the system in the first place!)
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deleted1065184
Yes, definitely agree. The focus should 100% be on outcomes. Incoming stats of students is meaningless.
Playing devils advocate - the match could be considered the competative part of the process for us, akin to law finding good firms after their degree. I think people underestimate the amount of inbreeding that goes on in the match, both between big names and within. As an example, someone going into IM with interests in competitive fellowships? Being at HMS is a FANTASTIC advantage for matching "Big 4" (another non-US News elite grouping phenomenon), which in turn is advantageous for fellowships. It's not all nonsense, even if you dont want to be a professor.
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deleted1065184
The devil doesn't need any more advocates, buddy lol jk. But there's a flaw in your argument. In your devil's advocate position, your end goal is really prestige. If you want to be at the most prestigious institutions, yes you will benefit from going to the most prestigious institutions beforehand. In that way, the argument is a bit circular. Because the truth is that you don't need to go to a "big 4" IM residency to get a fellowship, but going to a "big 4" residency will give you a bit of an edge if your goal is to do a fellowship at another highly prestigious program (which many people don't want to do, and others don't want to even do a fellowship at all).
But again, the only true benefit here is that you get a slight bump if your end goal is prestige. But if your goal is to practice medicine in a particular field, you don't need to go to any particular residency program. This simply cannot be compared to law school, where the hope is to get a job in a law or law-related field *at all*. The field is so saturated that it's legitimately harder for individuals from less prestigious schools to be able to practice law at all. You may not get into the field that you want in medicine, but that won't be because you didn't go to an ultra-prestigious school. It'll likely be a combination of subpar test scores, less-than-stellar clinical grades, weak letters, not applying to/ranking enough schools, etc. Nobody will convince me that a weak student at a top school will have a better shot at their top choice than a strong student at a less prestigious school.
*If you're arguing that going to one of those programs significantly increases the chance at getting a fellowship (regardless of prestige), I'd need to see data on that to believe that.*
And fyi, as somebody who is research-focused (almost done with my PhD and starting medical school in the fall), your publication record is a million times more important for career opportunities than where you did residency or fellowship...and for research, you try to go to schools that are strong in your field of interest, which does not track at all with any of the rankings.
This is incorrect. The use of “T14 law” came specifically because those 14 schools were listed high numerous times by USNWR.
I think your perception is based on some heavy misunderstandings. Medicine is unlike law or business because the job market is much less saturated (the bottle-neck is at the entry level of medical school, rather than post-training). There is much less need for subjective criteria to land a secure job or clients.
USNWR monopolized opinion by being the first to assign rankings to colleges -regardless of the accuracy of the metrics used - and then by exploiting google search results with the internet boom.
Here is a representation of why this is a problem.
If a school exploits one of the criteria used by the USNWR to rank them - such as incoming Student MCAT/GPA - it will land at the top of the ranking lists, regardless of anything changing about the school itself. If it lands near the top of the ranking list, students will apply to that school more often because it appears in their search results when they apply, and because the school in question will be certain to advertise it. This allows the school to then hold its ranking the next year - and even increase it - by further exploiting its student selectivity score. This works for
them, so they start doing this again the next year... and the year after that. Soon, faculty and funding start to slowly trickle more into that institution as talented students that were recruited perform well there, and make the institution look better as a result. Because these measures are also indices in the ranking system, this pushes the school even further up the rankings than it was previously, and this snowball effect only continues. Eventually, the generation that didn’t think much of the school ages, while the generation that saw that school appear at the top of the search results when they first applied become faculty themselves, and the “reputation” of that institution becomes more firmly rooted.
Now, did this change in the “reputation” of the school influence the teaching quality of that school; the opportunities it provided; or any other measure that would tangibly matter to the new incoming classes success that the previous generation didn’t have?
No.
....But the school consistently appears at the top of the list now, and it didn’t even have to change anything tangible to students to receive these benefits. In fact, focusing on anything else other than the indices that the ranking system focused on would actually negatively affect them, through opportunity cost.
And what of the other schools around, that suddenly feel burned that this institution shot up in reputation, while they spent the past 5 years intricately researching and re-designing curricula for their students based on what would improve their outcomes? Well, “to hell with that,” they say, as they stop focusing funds and time to cultivate their students, and begin further increasing their academic benchmarks to replicate that school’s success.
This is a representation of an idea called the “Matthew Effect,” and it is happening as we speak to NYU.
Point is - the current ranking system is not only severely flawed, but actively makes schools focus on aspects that have no bearing on their student’s success, which means they fail us - both students, and the taxpayers that fund us. But this can be changed.
There's no such data. If you don't think training somewhere like MGH or Brigham makes you attractive in the fellowship match, I can see why you view all rankings as bunk. I personally am 110% convinced that where you do residency has an effect.
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The 14 value is what became popularly accepted for reasons outside US News. And M7 is its own animal. Prior to the college rankings back in the 70s and 80s, people still knew what the Ivy League was as well as the strongest programs outside of it (Stanford, MIT etc). Schools like Harvard and Yale already had the lowest admit rates and highest test score ranges before the internet boom and before US news. It's wild to me that folks in our generation really think US News effectively tells people what to think.
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deleted1065184
It may give a slight edge to an applicant who is already strong (although maybe it won't, we don't really know and it's hard to debate something without good data haha), but I'd be highly surprised if it could make or break anybody. This is all speculation anyway, but I really do think we should try to pinpoint exactly how much of an edge you think the name will give...because many students will take full loans at Harvard over a full ride at their state school based on something for which there isn't any solid evidence, and that's just wild to me lol
My friend’s wife divorced him yesterday.
I told him “you should’ve chosen Chicago over Cornell. That big T17 Status boi”.
They never listen...
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Schools like Harvard only ask for sticker price from families who can provide it, so I wouldn't lose a ton of sleep over that. I think being at HMS is the single biggest advantage you could have for matching Harvard residencies, and being at Harvard residencies is the single biggest advantage you could have to matching Harvard fellowships. The degree of advantage is diminished but still substantial for applying out to similar institutions, and you'd have to mess up pretty badly as an MGH resident to not get interviews in your fellowship area at large. At some point we have to accept that certain topics are strictly qualitative. I have no data to tell you a residency full of DO and IMG graduates is less competitive than a residency full of "top" MD alums, and same concept for residencies into fellowships, but I'd be pretty shocked if you truly disbelieved that.
