Sidney Kimmel Medical College Ranking

The media outlet has countered that its lists are a valuable source of data for millions and are designed to be just one component of a student’s search process.

Thomas Jefferson University – Sidney Kimmel Medical College

Recommended course work is one year of: Biology with lab; Chemistry with lab; Organic Chemistry/biochemistry with lab; and Physics with lab.

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Approximately 75% of Jefferson graduates enter residency programs at University-affiliated hospitals around the nation. Jefferson graduates do very well in the residency-matching program, both in primary care and in more specialized fields.

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Clara A. Callahan, MD
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More elite medical schools have joined Penn in saying no to the U.S. News rankings. Here’s what students and physicians are saying.

The schools have said the rankings focus too heavily on qualities that have little to do with how well graduates take care of patients or help those from underserved communities.

When Glenn N. Cummings met with Bryn Mawr College students recently to discuss preparing for the medical school admission exam, he casually mentioned some news that stopped the meeting cold.

Top-ranked Harvard had just announced it would no longer participate in the annual rankings of the best medical schools by U.S. News and World Report.

“They all erupted in chatter,” recalled Cummings, associate dean for the school’s one-year postgraduate program for students preparing for medical school. “I had to shush them to get on with the meeting.”

Eleven other elite medical schools would soon follow, among them the University of Pennsylvania’s Perelman School of Medicine, just a few months before the start of application season. All are currently among U.S. News’ top 20 schools for research, and most also fared well on the media outlet’s list of best schools for primary care.

In announcing their decisions, the schools have said these lists focus too heavily on the MCAT standardized test, undergraduate grades, research funding, and other qualities that have little direct connection with the practice of medicine. The measurements also are not useful in identifying future physicians who will do the best job of treating patients from underserved communities, most of the schools say.

In a Jan. 24 letter to Perelman faculty and students, dean J. Larry Jameson wrote that while Penn is proud of its performance on the qualities that U.S. News measures, the process “reinforces a legacy approach to training and a narrow, subjective perception of schools by their peers.”

The media outlet has countered that its lists are a valuable source of data for millions and are designed to be just one component of a student’s search process.

Little to do with patients

The shake-up is being closely watched in the Philadelphia area, which has seven medical schools, an unusually high concentration. For now, most have said they will continue to submit data for the rankings, though one, Philadelphia College of Osteopathic Medicine, stopped participating 15 years ago.

It remains unclear what the new U.S. News rankings will look like when they come out this spring. Penn will likely remain in a top spot, as the school already had submitted its latest data before its Jan. 24 decision to withdraw from future lists.

Even those med schools that withdrew before the deadline may somehow be included, using whatever data are publicly available. U.S. News already has said it would do so in response to a similar flap: when Penn and other top-ranked universities withdrew from the media outlet’s process of ranking law schools.

A medical school’s place on the U.S. News lists has little to do with how well its graduates take care of patients, one 2018 study of Medicare beneficiaries suggests.

Patients treated by physicians who graduated from lower-ranked schools were just as likely to survive a hospital stay as those treated by doctors from higher-ranked schools, the authors found in an analysis of nearly 1 million admissions. That finding held true for schools on both the research and the primary care “best” lists.

However, for doctors who graduated from schools ranked higher for research, their patients were slightly less likely to require readmission to the hospital within 30 days — a standard health-care quality indicator. (One of the authors of the study, in the journal BMJ, was Harvard-trained Ashish K. Jha, who is now the White House COVID-19 response coordinator.)

Cummings, the Bryn Mawr dean, said he welcomed any deemphasis of the lists of “best” schools, contending that students are better off focusing on what school is the best fit for them.

“The rankings are too easy of a tool to just lean on,” he said.

Hard to get in

Students should consider other attributes, such as a school’s strengths in various medical specialties and how well its graduates fare with job placements, said Kristen E. Willmott, who advises med-school applicants for Top Tier Admissions, a counseling firm.

“The rankings don’t serve students as much as students think,” she said. “We really try to push back on that.”

Regardless of a medical school’s place on the lists, most are extremely hard to get into. Every year, more than half of med school hopefuls get in nowhere, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. For the class that began in the current academic year, just 23,810 out of 55,188 applicants were accepted for admission, the AAMC says.

Few schools share their own admission numbers, but one that does is in Philadelphia: Thomas Jefferson University’s Sidney Kimmel Medical College. Out of 11,090 applicants for this year’s new class, Jefferson accepted just 438 students (one out of every 25), for a rate of 3.9%. Of those admitted, 277 decided to attend.

In the latest U.S. News rankings, Jefferson was 56th for research and 61st for primary care, out of 124 on each list. The school is continuing to participate in the next such lists, expected in the spring.

Chasing ‘metrics’

While the elite med-schools have cited valid reasons for withdrawing from the U.S. News lists, they may be acting partly out of self-interest, according to nephrologist Bryan Carmody, who wrote about the issue for Medpage Today.

Boosting performance on various U.S. News metrics and compiling the data requires time and money, and some administrators clearly have decided it isn’t worth the hassle, he said in a phone interview.

“If people already think you’re the best, you can only lose,” he said.

Still, he said the outcome may be for the best. An associate professor of pediatrics at Eastern Virginia Medical School, Carmody blogs about medical education as The Sheriff of Sodium — a nod to his medical specialty, the kidneys, and also to the fact that he describes himself as “salty” about medical education.

“It’s not that ranking things is bad,” he said. “But in my mind, a lot of the metric-chasing is bad. To the extent that we’re freed up somewhat from that is a good thing.”