U.S. News & World Report released its annual medical school rankings and ratings July 23 after postponing them for the second year in a row.
The media company produced two separately computed lists, one for research and one for primary care. Both examined schools on faculty resources and the academic achievements of entering students. The research-oriented computation included four heavily factored measures of research productivity, and the primary care computation incorporated two heavily factored metrics for graduates entering primary care fields.
For both lists, the methodology was updated to place the top medical schools within four tiers of performance — based on their percentile performance among all rated schools — instead of ordinal rankings.
This was among the changes made after a national controversy that surfaced in 2023. More than a dozen top-tier schools — including Boston-based Harvard Medical School, Stanford (Calif.) University, Philadelphia-based University of Pennsylvania and New York City-based Columbia University — withdrew from the rankings process. The schools cited certain ranking measures — such as peer assessments from deans, admissions directors and academics and test scores — that they said give an edge to well-resourced schools as reasons for their departures.
In response, U.S. News delayed the rankings and updated its methodology. For example, in its research-oriented compilation, it doubled the weight of total federal research activity and added two indicators for National Institutes of Health research grants.
On April 8, the media company again pushed back the release of its annual rankings. The delay was announced one day before U.S. News published its graduate schools rankings. Medical schools that submitted data to U.S. News between fall 2023 and early 2024 had until June 21 review the data and address any necessary revisions or updates.
U.S. News also reversed some methodology changes it had announced in 2023. The media company said the latest medical school rankings exclude bibliometric data that measures schools' research and publications, award transparency credits, or rankings of specialty areas in medical research.
Ultimately, there were 102 medical and osteopathic schools with eligible data for this year's research-oriented computation, and 99 for the primary care computation.
"Compared with the previous edition of the rankings, 80% of the top 100 schools in both research and primary care were assessed, while the remaining 20% that declined to participate in the statistical survey were labeled as unranked," U.S. News said. "No schools were assessed solely on data reported in previous editions, unlike what was sometimes done for the prior 2023-2024 rankings edition."
The highest-performing medical schools for 2024, in alphabetical order, are:
Tier 1 medical schools for research
- Baylor College of Medicine (Houston)
- Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland)
- Emory University (Atlanta)
- Hofstra University/Northwell Health (Zucker) (Hempstead, N.Y.)
- Mayo Clinic School of Medicine (Alix) (Rochester, Minn.)
- Northwestern University (Feinberg) (Chicago)
- Ohio State University (Columbus)
- University of California Los Angeles (Geffen)
- University of California San Diego
- University of California San Francisco
- University of Cincinnati
- University of Colorado (Aurora)
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas)
- Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tenn.)
- Yale University (New Haven, Conn.)
Tier 1 medical schools for primary care:
- East Carolina University (Brody) (Greenville, N.C.)
- Saint Louis University
- Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (Lubbock)
- University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (Little Rock)
- University of California Davis
- University of California San Francisco
- University of Hawaii at Manoa (Burns)
- University of Kansas Medical Center (Kansas City)
- University of Maryland (Baltimore)
- University of Massachusetts Chan Medical School (Worcester)
- University of Minnesota (Minneapolis)
- University of Nebraska Medical Center (Omaha)
- University of New Mexico (Albuquerque)
- University North Texas Health Science Center (Fort Worth)
- Western University Health Sciences (Pomona, Calif.)
More information about the methodology is available here.