Dismantling Structural Racism: Time to Abandon Medical School Rankings

As one of us (R.S.) wrote in a recent Academic Medicine commentary, structural racism is pervasive in academic medicine, and institutions need to take bold action. Schools must implement comprehensive anti-racist policies and practices across all lines, from curricular reform, to promotion of diversity and inclusion at all levels, to building systems of accountability. Such work takes time, and change will not happen overnight. However, we propose one simple, bold action that schools can take immediately to show their commitment to ending structural racism: decline to participate in the U.S. News & World Report (USNWR) best medical schools rankings. By doing so, schools extricate themselves from an incentive structure that maintains an inequitable status quo. USNWR calculates scores from 5 domains: quality, National Institutes of Health (NIH) research activity (for a research ranking), match rates into primary care residencies (for a primary care ranking), student selectivity, and faculty resources. Academic medicine has long recognized that this scoring methodology does not include any measures of educational quality or of the practice outcomes of graduates. It is time to acknowledge that the USNWR ranking metrics also reward schools for racist outcomes. Below, we review 3 of the scoring domains and how these elements of the ranking methodology contribute to structural racism in the field. Quality: USNWR requests that deans rate peer institutions on a generic scale...
Source: Academic Medicine Blog - Category: Universities & Medical Training Authors: Tags: Featured Guest Perspective medical school rankings medical schools racism Source Type: blogs