‘Ivy League’ doesn’t mean excellent medical schools, according to new index

By Morgan Sweeney
The Center Square

In a new public ranking of American medical schools, two public Florida universities outscored the medical colleges at Harvard and the Mayo Clinic.

The Medical School Excellence Index is the inaugural report of the new Center for Accountability in Medicine and ranks schools according to their commitment to academic excellence, transparency and rejection of diversity, equity and inclusion principles.

Based on that rubric, the University of South Florida and the University of Central Florida both earned an A grade and landed in the top five medical schools in the country. So did the NYU Grossman School of Medicine, the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan’s medical school.

Harvard Medical School and the Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine earned B’s, as did the medical schools at Columbia, Duke, Northwestern and Stanford.

Academic excellence comprises 60% of the medical school’s overall grade and is based on two factors: the average undergraduate GPA and the average Medical College Admission Test score of its students.

Transparency refers to transparency “around student performance” and accounts for 15% of the school’s grade. It is also composed of two components – grading differentiation and presence of an Alpha Omega Alpha chapter.

The center included transparency as part of its ranking methodology because there’s been a growing movement in medical education to move away from grading scales to wholly pass-fail measures. In 2022, part one of the medical licensing exam became a pass-fail test.

“Most schools have done away with tiered grading in the preclinical phase (i.e. years 1 and 2 of medical school) and a small number – including UCSF and Yale – in the clinical phase (i.e. years 3 and 4) as well,” according to the center.

More competitive residencies, the center says, are better for students as they encourage students to push themselves academically and allow for collaboration among bright minds.

Alpha Omega Alpha is a medical honor society which has “historically been an important indicator of academic distinction,” according to the center, as it has traditionally accepted only the top 20% of students. But many medical schools have done away with their AOA chapters, and AOA itself has conferred to individual schools the authority to decide the qualifying criteria. Nonetheless, the center used affiliation with AOA as a standard for transparency.

The center evaluated the influence of diversity, equity and inclusion principles by identifying whether schools had a dedicated office of DEI or used DEI terminology in their mission statements.

By these standards, several institutions typically considered elite in the medical field did secure A grades, such as the medical schools of Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California, Vanderbilt and Cornell universities.

The medical colleges that performed the poorest and received F grades were those at the University of California Davis, Oregon Health & Science University, the University of New Mexico and Central Michigan University.

The Center for Accountability in Medicine was founded by the nonprofit Do No Harm, an organization that advocates for policy which keeps “identity politics,” DEI and gender-affirming care for minors “separate from medical education.”