MLive file photo of UM Medical School.Dominic Valente | The Ann Arbor News
ANN ARBOR, MI – The University of Michigan Medical School will no longer provide data to participate in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
This is the second UM school in the last three months to withdraw from the annual rankings, as the UM Law School stopped participating in November.
While not stating specific concerns with the U.S. News rankings, UM Medical School officials said they found the ranking methodology does not reflect the varied priorities of medical schools across the country, Michigan Medicine spokeswoman Mary Masson said.
“Most medical school deans will agree that what makes a great medical school are excellence in the education of physicians and in conducting meaningful research that advances health,” Masson said in a statement. “But it is very difficult to come up with a single set of measures that reflect the variety of outcomes that different medical schools value.”
Students are not helped by a simple aggregated score, as each student has different priorities, said Marschall Runge, dean of the UM Medical School.
“Creating an overall ranking blurs each school’s individual attributes into a single score or rank that only reflects priorities set by (U.S. News) itself,” Runge said in a statement.
UM’s Medical School ranked No. 17 nationally in the 2023 U.S. News medical school rankings. The methodology, found here, scores on assessments by peers and regional directors, student selectivity based on MCAT scores, GPA and acceptance rate, faculty resources and research activity.
UM Medical School leaders, faculty and students provided input that led to the decision to withdraw, officials said. Runge and other medical school deans across the country encouraged U.S. News to change its ranking process, Runge said.
“We made multiple suggestions to USNWR leadership urging change in their methodologies,” he said. “Ultimately, these discussions yielded only minor revisions to the methodology used to rank medical schools.”
UM Medical School directed prospective students to go to its website for data to assist in their decision making.
Michigan Medicine will still participate in other hospital or health system rankings to provide helpful information to patients and families, officials said. UM Health, the clinical division of Michigan Medicine, includes five hospitals and handles more than 2.3 million outpatient visits a year.
When UM Law School pulled out of the rankings, Dean Mark West said U.S. News rankings no longer “serve the public interest,” and that the methodology is “opaque” and based on subjective scores.
“The collected information might be interesting, but it is not based on a rigorous survey instrument, and even if it were, it should not guide decision making for prospective students (or anyone else),” West wrote in November.
“Nonetheless, law schools to a greater or lesser degree sometimes are forced to consider the effect of any changes in their programs on their rank. While Michigan has consistently resisted the pressure to take actions that are contrary to our mission, the demands of the U.S. News algorithm always lurk in the background.”
UM spokeswoman Kim Broekhuizen said no other changes are planned to pull UM schools from the U.S. News rankings.
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