Harvard Medical School Withdraws From U.S. News’ Rankings

The Harvard Medical School (HMS) will no longer participate in U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of medical schools, dealing the latest blow to the influential set of higher education rankings issued annually by that publication.

In a letter written to the Harvard community on Tuesday, George Q. Daley, the dean of HMS, said the school would no longer contribute data to the publication. While acknowledging several concerns about the methodology behind the rankings, Daley said that the reason for his decision was more fundamental.

“Educational leaders have long criticized the methodology used by USNWR to assess and rank medical schools. However, my concerns and the perspectives I have heard from others are more philosophical than methodological, and rest on the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs,” he wrote.

In U.S. News’ 2023 ratings for medical schools based on research, Harvard placed first. It was ranked 9th among medical schools for primary care.

Daley added that he had “contemplated this decision since becoming dean six years ago. The courageous and bold moves by my respected colleague Dean John Manning of Harvard Law School and those of peer law schools compelled me to act on behalf of Harvard Medical School. What matters most to me as dean, alumnus, and faculty member is not a #1 ranking, but the quality and richness of the educational experience we provide at Harvard Medical School that encourages personal growth and lifelong learning.”

The HMS decision comes on the heels of similar moves last year by law school deans at several prominent universities such as Yale, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Northwestern, Georgetown, Columbia, University of Michigan, and the University of California, Berkeley, all of whom said that they would no longer participate in the rankings because they were flawed and did not represent the values of legal education they wanted to instill in students. Those moves quickly prompted U.S. News to make a number of changes in its law school ranking methodology going forward.

In response to Harvard’s announcement, Eric Gertler, CEO and executive chairman of U.S. News, was quoted by Inside Higher Education as saying that “Our mission is to help prospective students make the best decisions for their educational future...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. The fact is, millions of prospective students annually visit U.S. News medical school rankings because we provide students with valuable data and solutions to help with that process.”

Daley acknowledged the need for students to have accurate, transparent information about their medical school choices and said that HMS would publicly share key information on its admissions website. He added that “comparable details for all U.S. medical schools, including HMS, are available in their raw, unweighted form via the Medical School Admission Requirements (MSAR) Reports for Applicants and Advisors, part of the Association of American Medical Colleges website.

Now the question becomes whether the HMS decision will lead other medical schools to end their participation in the rankings, resulting in a domino effect similar to that seen with the law schools. And the decision also ramps up the pressure on college and university presidents to reconsider their institutions’ participation in the undergraduate rankings given the principled objections from several of their most prominent deans.