The “Objectivity” of Medical School Rankings
The list of numbers and names that will determine the future of so many aspiring young doctors is out. Yes, the US News medical school rankings 2010 has come, and the schools stand in their lines like proud, parading soldiers, all pomp and ceremony on the page. The medical school ranking system is designed to provide a fair and unbiased compilation of useful information for picking out medical schools when applying, and to that end, it rates the medical schools against each other in the categories of primary care and research. But the medical school rankings are imperfect, because ultimately the system is not quite as objective as it might sound.
Any ranking system inherently requires a focus on certain chosen factors. Sometimes, it seems pretty easy to pick out which factors to rank; obviously, when ranking the fastest cars that have come out this year, you just rank their top speeds. But a ranking system is complicated by the search for the “best” of anything. In order to eliminate as much of the subjectivity as possible, the medical school ranking system of US News is based on numeric figures. Yet it is still pretty clear that these numeric figures not only fail to capture what may be a completely non-objectified level of quality at the medical school in question, but they also represent a focus on certain traits which will inherently wind up favoring certain schools over others in the medical school rankings.
US News splits its list into “Research” and “Primary Care,” and then offers additional information on the best schools in certain specialties like pediatrics. The theory there is that the medical school rankings for research schools will focus on informing students of which schools are the best for medical research, while the primary care medical school rankings will inform students which schools will help them to become the best clinicians possible. Interestingly enough, some of the best known names in the country, such as Harvard University, were at the top of the “Research” list, but not the “Primary Care” list. It wasn’t far down, but it still wasn’t in the top ten. The medical school rankings for research focused on such factors as research activity, both in the total and average activity per faculty member arenas, as well as on selectivity of students and mean MCAT scores. The primary care medical school rankings instead examined the percentage of MD or DO graduates who enter primary-care residencies, again along with the selectivity and the mean MCAT scores. There are other factors included; research had 8, primary care had 7. But these factors, for all that they present interesting information, don’t necessarily tell you much about what kind of doctors they are creating.
For instance, the increased selectivity of some schools, coupled with a high mean MCAT score, implies a very intelligent set of students would be at that school. But there’s no way to actually know that the school is creating a strong set of future doctors. Similarly, the primary care rankings are difficult to actually correlate to doctors’ quality; just because doctors are entering the field of primary care, does not mean that they are good doctors. These medical school rankings, while still useful and interesting, are not as definitive as they might seem at first glance. The simple fact that there are two different lists points out how hard it would be to truly have a single list to say that there is a “best” medical school, and it seems that even two lists may not be enough to do the variation of schools much justice.