Writer: Joshua Andino
2 min read January 2023 — UPenn Medicine has announced its decision to cease participation in the U.S. News and World Report rankings, even as several Philadelphia schools have once again made it to top spots.
The U.S. News and World Report rankings are considered one of the most comprehensive and well-established rankings when it comes to evaluating universities, colleges and other educational institutions. Despite this, the University of Pennsylvania Perelman School of Medicine announced yesterday its decision to cease participation moving forward with UNSWR.
J. Larry Jameson, dean for UPenn Medicine, was blunt in his letter announcing the decision. “The USNWR rankings perpetuate a vision for medical education and the future physician and scientist workforce that we do not share,” he wrote.
In Jameson’s statement, he argues that while the school will remain proud of its record and excels at the various categories by which UNSWR assesses its schools, the ranking system overall promotes an approach to education and medicine that the school is moving past, driven by a changing world and shifts in how both education and medicine are delivered.
“USNWR reinforces a legacy approach to training and a narrow, subjective perception of schools by their peers. While the Perelman School of Medicine has consistently ranked well by these measures, and we are proud of our reputation, we aspire to be judged more on our innovation, impact, the far-reaching accomplishments of our faculty and graduates, and our ability to keep our sights forward,” Jameson wrote.
UPenn is the latest school in what some outlets have described as an “exodus,” or “revolt,” against the rankings, which began late last year when law schools, starting with Yale University, announced its refusal to participate. Penn Carey Law, the University of Pennsylvania’s Law School, announced it would cease its own participation in December, with a statement calling it “unnecessarily secretive and contrary to important parts of our mission.”
While law schools were the first to break ranks, medical schools have followed suit, with UPenn Medicine being the most recent example.
Despite this, USNWR rankings will likely remain influential for the foreseeable future, and while a number of prestigious graduate schools have announced their intention to cease working with USNWR after multiple controversies around incentives, methodology and most recently the September announcement that Columbia University had been providing misleading or outright false information, the schools declining to participate in the rankings will still be featured in the overall list – but only based on publicly available data. Additionally, no undergraduate institutions have announced intentions to cease participation in the rankings.
USNWR CEO Eric Gertler released a statement last week in response to Harvard Medical School’s decision to cease working with USNWR, which read, “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.”
While graduate schools across the country are reassessing their relationship with USNWR, a number of others across the Philadelphia region have nevertheless made it to top spots in recently released rankings, with Villanova, Drexel, Lehigh, Rutgers – Camden, West Chester, Drexel, Saint Joseph’s and the University of Delaware all making it to the top 100.
For UPenn Medicine’s part, the decision will not impact the assessment of UPenn’s Hospital, Jameson noted, saying it is a separate program.
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