(TheLibertyRevolution.com)- A prestigious university school is withdrawing from a popular medical school rankings list.
On Tuesday, Harvard Medical School said it would no longer participate in the U.S. News & World Report’s rankings of medical schools over philosophical concerns it has.
The school said it would no longer send any information to the U.S. News & World Report, which is required for schools to be considered to be listed among the top medical schools in the United States. That announcement was made by Harvard’s dean of the faculty of medicine, Dr. George Q. Daley.
There have been many critics of the methodology the publication uses to come up with the rankings. Some of the factors they consider include assessments from residency directors, acceptance rate, test scores, grade point averages of students and peer assessments.
Daley said the concerns Harvard has with the rankings are philosophical in nature. He wrote:
“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.”
The U.S News & World Report currently ranks Harvard Medical School as the top medical school in the United States, which makes it more pertinent that the school is now dropping out of the rankings. It’s not as if the school believes that it’s too far down on the list, for instance.
Despite this, Daley said he believed the U.S. News & World Report rankings incentivize some medial schools to submit reports that are false regarding data, or prioritize some students who are high achieving for potential financial aid programs over others who may have a greater need for that financial aid.
In responding to Harvard’s announced decision, the executive chairman and CEO of U.S. News, Eric Gertler, told the Daily Caller News Foundation:
“Our mission is to help prospective students make the best decisions for their educational future. Where students attend school and how they use their education are among the most critical decisions of their life, and with admissions more competitive and less transparent, and tuition increasingly expensive, we believe students deserve access to all the data and information necessary to make the right decision.
“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.”
Dr. Stanley Goldfarb, who serves as the chairman of the medical school watchdog called Do No Harm, commented to DCNF that refusing to participate in the U.S News & World Report rankings is a way that Harvard could actually admit additional students so they could fulfill an internal diversity requirement.
