On Thursday, the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine announced it was withdrawing from the popular rankings published by U.S. News and World Report, the former newsweekly that has carved out a niche ranking individual programs and schools at colleges and universities, as well as entire institutions.
The decision wasn’t quite the profile in courage that the university implied. There was plenty of cover.
Within the last few days, such other high-ranked med schools as the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia and Stanford universities also have said they will no longer provide U.S. News with the data it uses for its rankings. They in turn had been sheltered by Harvard University’s top-ranked medical school, which announced its own refusal to provide the data on Jan. 17.
The revolt by these prestigious medical schools only took place after high-end law schools had put together the same kind of revolt last fall, as spearheaded by the top-ranked Yale Law School.
The reasoning? You’re unlikely to be fully enlightened by the Pritzker School of Medicine’s jargon-filled statement: “This decision is based on our judgment that the current methodology raises deep concerns about inequity perpetuated by the misuse of metrics that fail to capture the quality or outcomes of medical education for those who most need these data: Applicants to medical school.”
Got that? In essence, the University of Chicago, like its peers, is arguing that the rankings perpetuate elitism, which makes these elite institutions uncomfortable (in public, at least) and, these elites say, encourages schools to enroll students with the highest grades and test scores, since that is what the rankings reward, at the expense of qualities like (to quote the dean of the U. Penn School) “creativity, passion, resilience, and empathy.”
Sure, all those softer qualities are very important. But all things being equal, most of us going under a surgeon’s knife would also like to think the doctor had good grades and test scores too. We know plenty of fine doctors who manage to embody all of these things, which is how they got into a top medical school in the first place.
When did grades and test scores become so debased? And is this a way to quietly reduce the number of Asian American medical students? It sure could be put to work in that direction.
There’s something else at play here. Whatever the issues of “inequity” (although it’s a squishy argument to say that the current rankings promote that anyway, as distinct from providing beacons for minority success), the universities also dislike the rankings because they cannot control them. They’re an external judgment. Academics always hate that. They prefer peer reviews and, trust us, that is not because peer reviews are more reliable when it comes to the objective application of metrics.
Evidence of that can be found in what the Pritzker deans have proposed as a replacement for medical students wondering where to apply: the Chicago medical school, the Tribune reported, now “will share ‘essential information’ on its admissions website.”
Great. So we replace an independent judgment with additional marketing material put out by the school being judged, which is unlikely to highlight anything that shows it in a less than positive light. What could possibly go wrong with that?
Peer under the hood here and you find a lot of desire for control and a resistance to market realities. Given free rein, the top medical schools will operate more and more like a cartel, moving as a block.
Faculty and students at top medical schools are proud to work where they work, as well they should be. Whatever their administrators disavow in public, those rankings are not going away. They’ll merely be whispered among the elite, thus denying prospective medical students important information as they plan to take on the debt that such an education requires. And, despite what the schools say, those from poorer backgrounds will suffer the most without an independent source of information.
None of this is to say that U.S. News rankings are not flawed. In fact, we’ve long been troubled by their overreliance on the self-reporting of data and on corrupt peer reviewing. But that’s a matter for U.S. News editors and their readers.
In many ways, the publication now will to have to face up to what those of us in daily newspapering have known for decades: journalists have to do their own data-crunching work and rely as little as possible on the input of those being judged. If we are doing our job, there is a good chance they will be irritated by the findings and refuse to cooperate. Just like City Hall.
A lack of that awareness long has been one of the flaws in the rankings, and U.S. News now has a chance to end any and all of its cozy relationships with elite schools.
But rankings of universities and their programs are important in a competitive marketplace where schools charge colossal amounts of money for tuition. They provide something different, and far more valuable, from promotional copy on websites, where every medical school looks like it suffers from the Lake Wobegon effect: everyone’s achievements are above average.
One final note for Chicago’s medical school. Even as its peer law schools kvetched about having to live with these competitive outside rankings using factors with which it did not agree, Chicago’s superb law school (ranked number three in the nation) didn’t join the crowd. Instead, it said that the rankings were one of several factors and data points that potential students should consider.
Precisely. Given our great university’s stands on free speech and independent thinking, the medical school should have taken the same stance as U. of C.’s law professors did.
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The school's decision follows dozens of other law schools in a cross-country revolt against the rankings.
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