Penn’s med school is withdrawing from U.S. News rankings, joining Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia

The University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine said Tuesday it was dropping out of the annual rankings of best medical schools compiled by U.S. News & World Report, joining the med schools at Harvard, Stanford, and Columbia Universities.

The two annual lists — one for research, the other for primary care — place too much attention on grades, test scores, and subjective evaluations by physicians, Perelman dean J. Larry Jameson said in a letter to the school’s faculty, staff, and students.

Officials at the other schools have made similar comments in announcing their decisions this month. All four institutions are perennial chart-toppers in the U.S. News annual list of best schools for research, though they tend to score lower in the media outlet’s primary-care ranking.

Penn’s decision will take effect next year, as the school already has submitted its latest data for this year’s evaluation, Jameson wrote. While Penn has traditionally scored well in the rankings, the process fails to capture many of the qualities that make good doctors and researchers, he said.

“We strive to identify and attract students with a wide array of characteristics that predict promise,” he wrote. “The careers of transformative physicians, scientists, and leaders reveal the importance of other personal qualities, including creativity, passion, resilience, and empathy.”

Those qualities are especially important in serving diverse communities, he said.

Katrina Armstrong, dean of Columbia’s Vagelos College of Physicians and Surgeons, was even more outspoken in announcing her school’s move on Jan. 20.

The medical school rankings “perpetuate a narrow and elitist perspective on medical education,” she wrote. “Their emphasis is on self-reinforcing criteria such as reputation and institutional wealth, rather than measuring a school’s success in educating a diverse and well-trained cohort of doctors able to change medicine for the better and meet society’s needs.”

It’s just a beauty contest, is what it boils down to. No more, no less.

Asked for comment, U.S. News said it had no update beyond what its chief executive officer, Eric Gertler, said in response to Harvard’s announcement on Jan. 17. In a Jan. 18 statement, Gertler said the rankings were a valuable resource each year for millions.

“We believe students deserve access to all the data and information necessary to make the right decision,” he said. “We know that comparing diverse academic institutions across a common data set is challenging, and that is why we have consistently stated that the rankings should be one component in a prospective student’s decision-making process.”

Northwestern University physician William McGaghie, a longtime critic of the U.S. News rankings, welcomed the latest move from Penn.

“Dr. Jameson is exercising great leadership within the academic medical community by being among the first to say this is foolish nonsense,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s just a beauty contest, is what it boils down to. No more, no less.”

McGaghie, a professor of medical education and preventive medicine at Northwestern’s Feinberg School of Medicine, predicted other medical schools would soon withdraw from the ranking process.

Three other Philadelphia-area medical schools, Thomas Jefferson University’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Temple University’s Lewis Katz School of Medicine, and Cooper Medical School of Rowan University, said Tuesday that they would continue to participate.

In December, Penn’s law school also said it would stop submitting data for the U.S. News ranking process, instead publicizing the data on its own. Harvard and Yale law schools made similar announcements. But U.S. News said it would continue to rank law schools whether or not they submitted data.

In its latest evaluation of medical schools, U.S. News ranked Harvard as first in research, Columbia third, Penn sixth (tied with Duke University), and Stanford eighth. For primary care, Harvard placed ninth, Penn 20th, Stanford 30th, and Columbia 75th.

The rankings are based on a wide range of measures, including the faculty-student ratio, acceptance rate, peer evaluations, and scores on the MCAT standardized admission test.

The current rankings are based on data from the fall of 2021 and early 2022. Out of 192 accredited medical schools, 130 responded, and 124 were ranked in both research and primary care, U.S. News said in an online description of its methodology. Six schools were not ranked because as of mid-winter 2022, they had only provisional, preliminary, or pre-accreditation status, the media outlet said.

In addition to its two “best” lists, U.S. News also lists med schools by several other metrics, including most diverse and most graduates practicing in medically underserved areas.