<p>I'm a rising senior and very ignorant about medical schools. USN&WR has rankings for schools on Primary Care, Research, and Public Health. What's the difference?</p>
<p>My guesses:</p>
<p>Public health gives you a masters. You become an administrator/manager with minimal knowledge on the actual science compared to the actual doctors. You run the hospital or work at government agencies, etc. More of a business man. But could an MBA take the same jobs? Under what circumstances?</p>
<p>Primary care makes you a general doctor. You get the special M.D. But can you still go into research?</p>
<p>The "research" ones give you... an MD? And you obviously go into research. But can you still act as a doctor? Is this one perhaps a step "above" the primary care schools, because you can do both primary care and research? Or maybe these are all MD0granting medical schools with individual specialties?</p>
<p>As you can see I understand very little of what might seem basic to many of you, but I want to learn. Any resources/info on understanding the paths related to medicine would be very appreciated, thanks.</p>
<p>Without getting into the flaws with the USNews methodology</p>
<p>Generally, the differences are very MINOR. All the schools will grant you an MD and allow you to go in any direction. Where the differences arise are the culture and opportunities made available to medical students.</p>
<p>Your “research schools” will push students towards research projects from very beginning. There will be an emphasis on participation in research projects and the overwhelming majority of clinical faculty (clinical faculty being the MD’s that teach third and fourth year med students patient care), will have active research projects.</p>
<p>The “primary care schools” will place a greater emphasis on educating students to become good clinicians. They may provide greater opportunities for first and second year students to get into the clinics and be involved in patient care. They may put 3rd year students in unique situations during their clerkships (my med school is on the PC list, and our family medicine clerkships are in rural towns throughout the state). These unique opportunities may influence the choices of student’s specialties in the future.</p>
<p>The public health schools will do the same sorts of things but in regards to public health. They will encourage students to pursue MPH, may require public health projects from their students even if they’re not going for the extra credential. </p>
<p>The important thing to realize is that you get an MD from all the schools, and from any school you can go in any direction. If you go to a research school, you can go into public health. If you’re at a public health school, there’s nothing preventing you from going into primary care. And obviously, if you go to a primary care school, you will have no problem doing research. In fact, there are many residency programs across all specialties that require their residents to complete research. And many fellowship programs (for further subspecialization) also require research. For example, the national board governing the pediatric subspecialty fellowships (ie peds cardiology, peds emergency medicine, peds gastroenterology or neonatalogy) requires every single peds fellow to complete between 12 and 18 months of research (with a project to show for it) during their three year fellowship.</p>
<p>I asked similar Q when I was shadowing a doc… he has both MD and MPH degrees. He said, “public health let you treat the whole population while medicine (MD) emphasizing on small group of people”. You get the idea.</p>
<p>BRM: Are you sure about the public health? I’m pretty sure that’s USN ranking MPH programs, not medical schools which are good at public health.</p>
<p>@BDM…</p>
<p>I didn’t look at the USNews so I just assumed they’d added a public health ranking. If it’s just a ranking of MPH programs, forget what I said about them.</p>
<p>This is interesting. I thought “medical school” was just medical school, no separate rankings for research or primary care.</p>
<p>And yes, I think USN was just ranking MPH schools, not MD schools.</p>
<p>I’ll keep researching the differences between all of these these, but thanks Bigredmike for the clarification.</p>
<p>Bluntly, it’s not clear to me why USN separates them out.</p>
<p>Both rankings are pretty flawed, for two reasons.</p>
<p>1.) Most students that I’ve seen want neither a primary care nor a research career. Most of them want an as-yet-undetermined specialist career, and USN doesn’t rank those in any quantitative manner.</p>
<p>2.) Even on their own merits, the lists are imperfect. BRM points out that many schools have non-NIH research budgets, and the research list ignores those. The primary care list is really a joke, since it just measures the proportion of kids going into specialties that USN thinks might be primary care careers.</p>
<p>3.) Here’s the bottom line: the research list is pretty good if you want to be a researcher. These researchers will also be practicing physicians, but their careers are mostly defined by research. The primary care is just plain useless, even if you’re interested in a career in primary care.</p>
<p>Generally, you’ll notice that student selectivity measures are more tightly correlated with the research rankings than the primary care rankings, as are USN’s prestige metrics. But the fit isn’t perfect.</p>
<p>4.) Here’s the EVEN MORE bottom line (subterranean?): people at primary care schools can go on to research careers; people in research schools will be taking care of patients. The effects are noticeable, but they’re probably more due to student self-selection than to opportunities available to them.</p>
<p>Unlike law school or business school, where the “rank” of your program matters quite a bit, it’s less important in medicine. Especially if your main career goal is to care for patients.</p>
<p>The only thing that I find moderately useful in the US news rankings is the residency director opinion on a scale of 1-5.</p>
<p>Yeah, but residency director opinion is still highly unreliable…extremely dependent on specialty, certainly impacted by where the program director did their training, and most likely mostly linked to personal experience with residents from certain medical schools. Further, we don’t know which PD’s returned the survey to begin with. There’s undoubtedly a self selection factor in there to further complicate the real significance of those ratings.</p>