Increasing Transparency for Medical School Primary Care Rankings—Moving From a Beauty Contest to a Talent Show

The U.S. News & World Report (US News) annually ranks educational institutions on several criteria that affect many readers’ views of their institutional reputations. One critic of the US News rankings recently declared the medical school rankings a “beauty contest.” We agree and set out several years ago to persuade US News to shift the source of its data and diversify the foci of its medical school rankings to reflect a broader range of social mission metrics. We focused this effort on US News’ “Best Medical Schools: Primary Care” ranking because of the ongoing erosion of the primary care physician workforce and because, for some schools, it is a specific social mission.