Dean's Brown Bag
James L. Madara, MD
Sara and Harold Lincoln
Thompson
Distinguished Service Professor
Dean, Division of the
Biological
Sciences
and the Pritzker
School of Medicine
On February 23, Dean James Madara and Holly Humphrey met with thePritzker student body for their quarterly Brown Bag lunch. During this session,Dean Madara provided an overview of how the US News and World Report rankings are organized and presented other metrics for evaluating our institution.
US News and World Report rankings are determined by the following factors:
- Peer assessment (the report of the Residency Program Directors and Council of Deans regarding the quality of the University of Chicago graduates)
- Research dollars (the level of NIH funding achieved by the school's faculty)
- Student selectivity based on MCAT and GPA averages
- Faculty to student ratios
In 1993, US News and World Report began to evaluate institutional research success via aggregate research funding as opposed to per capita research funding dollars. As a relatively small institution, the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine, with its 769 full time faculty members, cannot achieve the total dollars acquired by such institutions as Harvard Medical School (6,357 faculty members) or Johns Hopkins (2,057).
However, other evaluations of our institution demonstrate that the University of Chicago’s reputation and faculty research productivity are much stronger than US News andWorld Report rankings would indicate. For example, in a 2002-03 AAMC benchmark study of Academic Medical Centers, the University of Chicago ranked 6th in the country in terms of its per capita research funding and by peer evaluation alone, the University of Chicago is considered the 13th best school in the country.
This year, US News and World Report, after intense lobbying from smaller academic medical centers, began to use a blended research funding metric. Two-thirds of the research funding ranking is derived from aggregate research funding and one third from per capita (faculty/dollars) funding. This change directly benefited the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine which rose from 22nd to 19 th this year in the USNWR rankings, largely on the basis of our national per capita research funding (5th nationally in 2005). Other factors affecting this change include small but significant increases in student selectivity. This rise in the rankings reflects improved measurement of the programmatic distinction of the University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine.
