
Harvard Medical School joined the growing list of schools declining to participate in the U.S. News & World Report rankings.
U.S. News & World Report has been ranking schools in various different categories for years. While there has always been a degree of criticism associated with the list, that criticism has bubbled over recently as several prominent law schools decided to end their participation in the rankings.
The main grievance for those institutions was the methodology. But for Harvard Medical the reasoning was more nuanced.
“Educational leaders have long criticized the methodology used by USNWR to assess and rank medical schools” Said Dean George Q. Daley. “However, 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.”
Harvard’s Law School already dropped out of the law school rankings back in November.
U.S. News & World Report has said that schools that decline to participate will still be ranked but they will simply base the ranking on publicly available information as opposed to information submitted by the schools themselves.