More grad schools are ditching college rankings

Remember a couple of months ago, when we wrote about how Yale Law School leaving the US News & World Report’s annual list of top colleges could lead to more schools denouncing the rankings? Well, not to toot our own horn or anything… but we were right. Since then, two dozen top law schools – including Stanford, UPenn, Columbia, Georgetown, Duke, and Northwestern – have all followed Yale’s lead and announced plans to leave the rankings.

And now, the exodus has spilled over to med schools. Harvard announced yesterday that its medical school, currently ranked 1st in research and 9th in primary care, will no longer submit data to US News’ annual list of top med schools.

⏩ Driving the move… Harvard Med dean Dr. George Q. Daley told the WSJ the school withdrew over concerns that the rankings incentivize colleges to falsify data, center policies around rankings, and divert financial aid from students with need to those with high test scores. Which isn’t much different than what Yale Law cited as its reasons for leaving the rankings.

📸 Big picture: The US News & World Report rankings, just like Ron Burgundy, are kind of a big deal. For decades, participating schools have highlighted their placement to prospective students, and some university leaders even get paid bonuses if their schools move up the rankings.

Though as you may expect, this setup has contributed to more scandals than in the show Scandal. The most recent of which occurred in September, when Columbia University admitted to submitting inaccurate data to US News to influence its position in the rankings.