New rankings reveal the REAL top medical schools

Americans are becoming increasingly wary of higher education: More than two-thirds of the country says colleges and universities are heading in the wrong direction.

To regain their trust in these critical institutions, Americans need to know which ones are providing a high-quality education — and which are not.

That’s why this week my organization, Do No Harm, is launching a new ranking system for medical schools.

It’s essential information for prospective medical students and their parents — and just as useful for patients who need to know if their doctors received an outstanding education focused on health . . . because many do not.

For example, Harvard’s and Yale’s medical schools, for all their prestige, are nowhere near the best in the nation.

We’re ranking medical schools because they’ve been at the forefront of higher education’s decline in recent years — and because every American depends on the care their students go on to provide.

For the better part of a decade, many medical schools have devoted extensive class time to divisive woke ideology, claiming that public health depends on it.

They’ve also placed an enormous emphasis on racial discrimination, to the point that many schools are flagrantly violating the Supreme Court’s ban on race-based admissions.

When future physicians are admitted based on skin color instead of merit, the quality of the medical workforce suffers.

When those same students are taught about “intersectionality” and “colonialism” instead of real medical practice, they’re less able to provide the care that helps patients lead healthy lives.

It’s a direct threat to every patient in America — so we need to know which medical schools, if any, are still putting the expert practice of medicine first.

Yet until now, this information has been elusive.

US News & World Report — long the go-to source for national education rankings — judges medical schools on measures like government grant funding and the percentage of graduates practicing primary care.

This data paints an incomplete picture at best, and a misleading one at worst.

By contrast, our rankings get to the heart of the matter, starting with merit — whether medical schools admit students with high undergraduate GPAs and MCAT scores.

These are the proven predictors of a medical student’s likelihood of succeeding in medical practice, yet many institutions downplay these standards. Merit is the most important factor in our ranking system.

We also weigh each medical school’s grading policies.

Many institutions have abandoned letter or numerical grades in favor of a pass/fail system, making it harder to determine which students truly excel.

Some have even gotten rid of Alpha Omega Alpha, the venerable national medical honor society — which, because it admits only the top 20% of each class, is a key indicator of academic achievement.

Med schools have taken this foolish road in the name of “equity,” yet removing this competitive yardstick gives students less reason to excel, while making it harder for residency programs to choose the best applicants.

All this hurts medical excellence, and schools that do so are penalized in our rankings.

Finally, we examine every medical school’s commitment to the divisive and discriminatory ideology of DEI, which inevitably leads to poor educational quality and a less skilled physician workforce.

If a school embeds this worldview in its mission statement, or maintains a DEI office, it gets penalized.

Taken together, our new rankings revealed some surprising winners.

The best medical school in America, we found, is the University of South Florida’s Morsani College of Medicine.

This school eschews identity politics and centers merit, admitting students with sterling MCAT scores and GPAs.

USF got a perfect score in our rankings, making it a model for the entire medical education system.

Our top 10 includes some other unexpected institutions, including the medical schools at the University of Central Florida, the University of Arizona Phoenix, and the University of Texas campuses in both Austin and San Antonio.

New York’s NYU Grossman School of Medicine ranks in the top five.

But the nation’s most esteemed medical schools didn’t fare so well: Harvard Medical School came in at number 53 in our rankings, while Yale sits in 75th place.

That’s a sad indictment of their commitment to ideology rather than excellence.

Our findings should change how our country thinks of medical schools, and refocus attention on the institutions that do the hard work of training world-class doctors — the doctors who patients actually want to see.

They also shine a light on schools that have kowtowed to woke demands — to the detriment of their own students and American health care as a whole.

If our country is going to regain its faith in higher education, we must first reveal which institutions truly deserve it.

Ian Kingsbury is director of the Center for Accountability in Medicine at Do No Harm.