Rest assured, dear readers, that we are, as always, preserving the recordings of the Regents meetings this week and will get to review them in due course. We have already reviewed the Tuesday meeting. Meanwhile, other things are happening in the world.
Remember the story of the law schools, including at UC, which pulled out of cooperating with the rankings published by US News and World Report? Now the Harvard Med School has joined the pull-out movement. Will other med schools follow? What about UC med schools? From the New York Times:
Harvard Medical School will no longer submit data to U.S. News & World Report for the magazine’s annual “best medical schools” rankings, becoming the university’s second graduate school to boycott the list in recent months, the school’s dean said on Tuesday. In a letter, Dr. George Daley, dean of the faculty of medicine, said he had been debating the decision since becoming dean six years ago and was inspired by a group of top law schools that withdrew from the rankings last fall. “My concerns and the perspectives I have heard from others are more philosophical than methodological, and rest on the principled belief that rankings cannot meaningfully reflect the high aspirations for educational excellence, graduate preparedness, and compassionate and equitable patient care that we strive to foster in our medical education programs,” Dr. Daley said.
U.S. News has published the rankings for decades, and while they have come under growing criticism, they continue to be an influential guide for students and their parents during the college selection process. Dr. Daley said the rankings create what he called “perverse incentives” for institutions to report misleading information and set policies that boost rankings. Although Harvard’s medical school will no longer share key data with the magazine, it will continue to share some of the data on its admissions website. Harvard Medical School was ranked first in the magazine’s 2023 best medical school for research list, released last spring, and the Grossman School of Medicine at New York University was ranked second. Tying for third were the College of Physicians and Surgeons at Columbia University, the School of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University and the School of Medicine at the University of California, San Francisco.
Medical schools are evaluated on faculty resources, the academic achievements of entering students and qualitative assessments by schools and residency directors, according to U.S. News...
Full story at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/us/harvard-medical-school-us-news-rankings.html.
Yours truly, who taught labor economics for many years, can't help but noting that all rating and evaluation systems create perverse incentives "to report misleading information and set policies that boost rankings." We live in an imperfect world with incomplete information with which to make decisions. So, if you are going to have any kind of review system, the issue is not which one is perfect - since there will never be perfection - but which one is better than the others. But maybe it's not surprising that lawyers came up with better objections and arguments than doctors!
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https://ia904704.us.archive.org/3/items/new-year-outlook/harvard%20med.mp3
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