Do Medical School Rankings Matter? (2024)
/What impact do medical school rankings have on residency chances? Learn the truth.
Learn how medical school rankings might impact your residency and career prospects
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Part 1: Introduction
Assuming all things are equal, such as location and cost of attendance, you probably want to attend the highest-ranked medical school you can get into.
Lots of students and schools talk about finding “the right fit,” but our nearly 20 years of experience helping students get into top med schools have shown us that, when it comes down to it, most students prefer to attend “the best available.”
We certainly don’t blame you. You’ve invested countless hours and immense effort into crafting a competitive medical school application, and you rightfully aspire to reap the rewards of your hard work.
Still, it’s worth asking: Are medical school rankings important? If so, how important are they?
In this guide, we’ll explore these questions so you can better understand how to consider rankings when choosing which medical schools to apply to and which to ultimately attend.
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Part 2: How are medical school rankings produced?
We Americans love ranking things. We rank things like the best burgers in America and the best cities for dating, so of course, we also rank our country’s medical schools.
U.S. News provides the most popular medical school ranking system, which includes separate lists for research and primary care.
When it comes to the best medical schools in the U.S., the U.S. News research rankings are the go-to. The 2023—2024 list reveals the prestigious Harvard, Johns Hopkins, UPenn Perelman, Columbia, and Duke* as the top five.
[*Note: Duke is listed first in the #5 spot, but it’s tied with Stanford, UCSF, Vanderbilt, and Washington University (in St. Louis).]
However, few people consider how medical school rankings are compiled. A closer look under the hood provides the following methodology for the U.S. News 2023 research list:
Qualitative Assessment: 25%
Peer assessment score: 12.5%
Residency director assessment score: 12.5%
Research activity: 45%
Total federal research activity: 15%
Average federal research activity per faculty member: 7.5%
Student selectivity: 15%
Median MCAT total score: 10%
Median undergraduate GPA: 4%
Acceptance rate: 1%
Faculty resources: 15%
This methodology produces a list in which the top ninety percent of med schools are ranked numerically, the bottom ten percent receive a ranking range (i.e. all schools in this bracket are ranked #118–#130), and other schools are simply listed as “unranked.”
Why are some medical schools unranked?
Medical schools that are unranked did not furnish U.S. News with enough statistical data to receive a ranking, or they aren’t fully accredited. Schools typically don’t publicize their unranked status, which means that aside from the accreditation issue, applicants are left wondering why a school has declined to participate.
There are a few common reasons why med schools go unranked. Sometimes schools are recently established and there simply isn’t enough data on them yet to create a meaningful ranking. Other schools know that they’re likely to rank poorly given the U.S. News methodology—for instance, their research isn’t particularly robust—and decide it’s better to be unranked. And then there are others that decline to participate out of ideological opposition to the rankings themselves.
Thus, it’s difficult to draw any sweeping conclusions about the quality or even the prestige of unranked medical schools as a whole. While many unranked schools are certainly lesser known, there are also established, reputable programs in their midst.
That’s why, when evaluating unranked med schools (or any med school, for that matter), you should research criteria such as average GPA and MCAT scores, average Step scores, residency match lists, national/regional reputation, curriculum, and so on.
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Part 3: How much do medical school rankings matter for you?
While reviewing the U.S. News ranking methodology in the previous section, you may have asked yourself some of the following questions:
What does research activity have to do with my education or career?
What do faculty resources have to do with me?
I see that student selectivity matters for med school rankings, but how will that affect my chances of getting into a competitive residency?
If you’re like most people, you probably care less about what U.S. News and other ranking systems think are important for medical schools to demonstrate and more about how perceptions of the medical school you attend will impact your education, residency options, and career.
Bear in mind that most medical schools provide a strong education, and nearly all medical school graduates will be accepted as a resident somewhere.
Therefore, what concerns most physicians—unlike, say, many law school or business school grads—is not whether they’ll get a job, but rather which job they’ll get (i.e., which residency, which specialty, which hospital, what salary) and where they’ll land (i.e., in which city).
These are fair concerns because the quality of your residency training will indeed impact your medical knowledge, care quality, and earning potential as a future attending or independent physician.
Since residency is so critical, it’s worth understanding which factors most influence residency interview decisions. Fortunately, the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) routinely surveys program directors to determine which factors they find to be most important.
Below are the ten factors that program directors cited in 2021 as most important when selecting applicants to interview (ranked by the percentage of programs that cited each).
In addition to telling us how many programs cited each factor, the NRMP also lets us know how important that factor was rated on average, using a scale of 1–5 (represented by the number in parentheses).
While the NRMP deleted these factors from the 2022 survey in order to focus more on opinions of virtual interviews, the following numbers still tell an interesting story.
USMLE Step 1 score: 86.2% (3.7)
Medical student performance evaluation (MSPE/Dean’s letter): 85.9% (4.0)
ERAS letters of recommendation in the specialty: 85.1% (4.2)
Residency personal statement: 83.8% (3.9)
Diversity characteristics: 80.9% (4.1)
Perceived commitment to specialty: 79.5% (4.3)
USMLE Step 2 CK score: 78.8% (3.8)
Having overcome significant obstacles: 75.5% (4.1)
Grades in required clerkships: 74.6% (3.9)
Any failed attempt in USMLE: 74.1% (4.4)
Notably absent is any criterion to do with where applicants have attended medical school. In fact, “medical school reputation” ranks behind 31 other factors, with just 38 percent of programs citing it as a factor in determining interview invitations. Among those programs, it received an importance ranking of 3.7 out of 5.
Nevertheless, the following questions come to mind:
Isn’t 38 percent still a lot? That means over a third of all residencies will consider which school I went to!
Yes, 38 percent is nothing to scoff at. However, the above list suggests that how well you do at a given school matters more than which school you attend. For instance, a student in the top ten percent of their class at the #40 school who does well on the Step 1 exam would be quite competitive for many residencies.
Can we really believe that, just because program directors less commonly state that the specific school matters, that it truly matters less?
Yes, for the most part. Given that school prestige earned an importance rating of just 3.7, we can safely assume that most program directors who do consider it think it’s less important than the majority of other factors.
Still, we don’t learn whether highly competitive individual residency programs are more or less likely to consider a school’s ranking when evaluating applicants, compared to less competitive programs.
It’s also simply impossible to know whether a residency application reviewer can truly be “school blind.” For instance, if an evaluator notices that a student attends Harvard Medical School, will they really not factor in its strong reputation, even subconsciously?
How does specialty factor into this? Won’t highly competitive specialties favor applicants from highly ranked medical schools?
Luckily, the NRMP survey breaks the data down by specialty, revealing that, when it comes to school prestige, most specialties don’t deviate much from the averages listed above:
In the majority of specialties, between 30 and 50 percent of program directors cited school attended as a factor when determining who to interview.
The importance of school attended, on average, was rated between 3.3 and 3.8 across nearly all specialties.
There are sometimes notable outliers—for example, in past PD surveys, being a graduate of a highly regarded med school was cited as a factor by the majority of radiation oncology programs and vascular surgery programs. On the flip side, many fewer psychiatry residencies and internal medicine-pediatrics residencies revealed that they considered which med school applicants had attended.
Given that vascular surgery residencies are some of the most competitive residencies in all of medicine, and primary care specialties are typically the least, it might appear that there is some correlation between competitive specialties and med school prestige.
However, there’s more to it than just competitiveness. While radiation oncology is also among the most competitive fields, radiation oncology residencies are known for focusing heavily on research experience. Since top-ranked med schools are without fail also research powerhouses, it’s logical that radiation oncology programs are unusually attuned to which med schools applicants have graduated from.
Here’s what we can take away from this: Generally speaking, around a third of all program directors will consider which med school you attended, regardless of their specialty’s competitiveness. Nevertheless, certain specialties may take rank or prestige into account in unique ways. We encourage you to review the interview data for the specialties that interest you specifically.
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Part 4: Our conclusion about the importance of medical school rankings
Coupled with our research, our conversations with medical school faculty and residency program directors have led us to believe that medical school rankings do matter when it comes to the residency match, but that they’re not everything.
Therefore, rankings should be one factor of several—such as location, cost, likelihood of acceptance, USMLE Step 1 pass rates, program offerings, and so forth—when choosing which medical schools to apply to.
Most applicants don’t matriculate into medical school in any given year, let alone have the luxury of choosing between schools.
Therefore, it’s important to develop a balanced school list that matches your performance across various medical school requirements, including your GPA and MCAT score, as well as your medical education priorities. Then, write strong application materials (e.g. your medical school personal statement, secondary essays, and AMCAS Work and Activities), ace your medical school interviews, and consider rank when the dust has settled.
About the Author
Dr. Shirag Shemmassian is the Founder of Shemmassian Academic Consulting and one of the world's foremost experts on medical school admissions. Over the past 15 years, he and his team have helped thousands of students get into medical school using his exclusive approach.
