The University of Michigan Medical School will no longer participate in the annual U.S. News & World Report rankings of medical schools, joining other medical schools nationwide and making it the second major UM school to bow out of the popular rankings.
UM leaders announced Monday the criteria used to rank medical schools by U.S. News and World Report has “long been a concern at the University of Michigan and many medical schools across the country,” according to a press statement.
“The fundamental problem is that an aggregated score, based on many different dimensions, cannot possibly help students or others evaluate institutions with respect to their individual priorities,” said Marschall S. Runge, dean of the UM Medical School, CEO of Michigan Medicine and executive vice president of medical affairs for the University of Michigan.
“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 and World Report) itself.”
Numerous suggestions have been made by UM and other medical school deans to make changes to U.S. News and World Report’s ranking process, he said.
“Ultimately, these discussions yielded only minor revisions to the methodology used to rank medical schools,” Runge said.
UM will continue to participate in U.S. News and World Report’s rankings of hospital and health systems, “which may provide helpful information to patients and families,” officials said.
UM joins medical schools at the University of Chicago, Duke and Harvard universities that have announced they are pulling out of the annual rankings by U.S. News & World Report.
“We understand that some students have used rankings to inform their choices,” said Debra F. Weinstein, executive vice dean for academic affairs at the UM Medical School and chief academic officer for Michigan Medicine. “Sharing specific data points on our public website will help prospective students and others evaluate aspects of our school that are most important to them.”
UM’s medical school joins the university’s law school, which in November said it was dropping out of the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of colleges and universities, joining others including Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Georgetown, Stanford and University of California at Berkeley that no longer will participate.
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