#19: Rankings

Medical schools have a love-hate relationship with the U.S. News & World Report rankings. On the one hand, they will tell applying students that rankings don't matter, in order to get the applicants to consider the school over more highly ranked schools. On the other hand, if any department of the medical institution gets ranked well in that magazine, you can be sure that they will shove it in your face and never let you forget it. Going to one of U.S. News's Top Hospitals is like walking into an advertisement for the hospital itself; you will see posters up everywhere telling you how awesome they are, as if that knowledge is somehow going to improve the quality of care that you receive.

Medical school rankings are important to some people (like Asian parents), but it is true that they don't really matter in the grand scheme of things. For example, the reason that U.S. News & World Report always ranks Harvard Medical School and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine so highly is because people are always going to be impressed if you attend medical school there. The people at U.S. News & World Report like to state different factors that they "took into consideration" when ranking schools, but overall the statement of these factors is just their attempt at justifying their own bias in school placement. The placement of any school after Harvard and Johns Hopkins is irrelevant, because in the eyes of residency directors, all these other "good" schools are completely equal to each other.

If you are ever told by a school official how well their school placed on the latest rankings, be sure to ask a lot of questions about how the rankings were derived. Ask for a lot of specifics, such as how much improvement there was in the factor of alumni donations from the previous year. Asking for this kind of detailed information allows you to seem like you possess a wealth of knowledge about the process, which will easily fool most administration officials.