Down from a high of #8 as recently as 2013.
This is unsurprising, as NIH funding continues to decline at Chicago, and its academic peer scores are quite low.
When will the descent stop?
UChicago med is ranked #18.
And this is disappointing, because the school does so well elsewhere - great performance in business (#1), law (#4), obviously college is #3, etc.
no doubt pritzker’s rep has been dropping a bit, but these rankings are pretty ridiculous. nyu at 3 is insane and not even remotely close to reality.
There are too many grad schools and grad programs named Pritzker. That donor can not be relied on to rescue its namesake med school because it is spread way too thin among so many grad programs. Perhaps, UChicago should have gone for a donor who will be able to provide a follow up injection of support, if needed.
Spread too thin among grad programs? I think Pritzker is a bit busy spending his money on something totally different rn (especially today)
Major changes to the ranking this year: inclusion of non-NIH research funding (e.g. private donations, grants from other federal bodies & state government) and increase in weight of research funding (from 30% to 40%).
Pritzker has done very poorly on both fronts. Private donations, along with non-NIH funding sources at a federal or state level, propelled NYU to #3 from #11 (#32~34 just 5 years ago!!) and Mayo from around #22 to #6. I for one support this change in methodology, seeing how institutions are desperately trying to diversify/divert their funding sources away from NIH.
Considering Pritzker’s recent $100 million gift from the Duchossois family, I expect Pritzker’s rank to either stabilize or rise a few spots in next year’s ranking. I wouldn’t be surprised if they continue to plummet in the ranking though, as they’re really struggling when it comes to NIH funding (and altogether NIH funding - total NIH funding and per capita - is weighed 12x as much as private donation in the ranking so I’m afraid spike in private donation isn’t sufficient to compensate for Pritzker’s dwindling NIH funding).
Didn’t the med school ranking go up from last year? Yale and Columbia each dropping in Bus and med.
The city of Chicago doesn’t have a “top-ranked” med school? That’s actually hard to believe.
UChicago was tied for 15th last year and NU 17th. Now both are 18th (tie) and 20th, respectively.
NYU shot up from #12 (tie) last year to #3 now? Really?
^^ Oh, and Mayo was #20 last year and is now #6.
These schools are all excellent. Where you see rapid moving around in the rankings is where the exact ordering starts to lose cred.
There are four public medical schools ranked higher!!! :((
NYYU has become a power house in medicine and they are very dominant in NY. Mayo deserves its spot. NO question.
Actually, 5 publics (6ish depending on how you categorize Baylor Med).
But @TomSrOfBoston, why do you think that’s noteworthy? Many publics are STEM powerhouses. There are 9 publics ranked above Princeton (and Penn and JHU) in grad engineering.
Only someone from a part of the country that starves their public schools would think that says anything about the U of C.
@PurpleTitan That was a sarcastic post due to the obsession with rankings shown here. In many circles rankings are seen as irrelevant and detrimental (except when one’s own school drops in the rankings).
Honest question: What does it matter? How big is the difference between #1 and #10 in the medical school world, or between #10 and #20? These are all pretty terrific institutions, as far as I can tell, and my sense of medicine is that the world is a lot flatter than it is in law or business.
Another honest question: How much does size matter? I note that Chicago, Mayo, and a medical school in Hawaii are the only schools with under 400 students in the top 50, and most of the top schools have twice the number of students Chicago has. If there’s some relationship between the number of students and the number of faculty, does that mean Chicago isn’t covering its bases effectively?
“Mayo deserves its spot. NO question.”
It does? Rochester is a delightful town but it’s not exactly Philly, So. Cal. or New York. Or Chicago, for that matter. Mayo is a respectable research facility with some top talent, a very small medical college, and a sizable marketing budget.
Rank them by MCAT scores and you’ll get a better idea of appropriate placement. The quality of research among the medical faculty is going to be correlated with the desire to attract top, research-oriented students.
@JHS In fact, according to some serious department heads I saw last night, as long as you are in the top 25-30 medical schools, the relative rankings matter a lot less than in law or business. Residency is what matters most.
How do Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge even hold their heads up when all the universities hit the playground at recess. They are not top anything in any professional school category. They must feel so inadequate!
Seriously, it’s nice that Chicago has good professional schools, but it would still be a great university without them. One of the things that’s great about Chicago, though, is the high degree of integration of the professional schools with the rest of the university. I’m not certain that’s the case at Harvard or Stanford.
Note: H and S are top 5 in Education, too. Chicago is . . . ooops, not playing in that league. But Harvard and Chicago are top 5 in Public Policy, and Stanford isn’t. Chicago, you go!
Well, Chicago is top ten or higher in many many academic fields, and its not just economics. For example,how does Chicago get a top 1 rating in English tied with UC Berkeley ?
I doubt that the med school will ever rise that much as its mostly a money losing operation and without a very large endowment it will be hard to improve its overall status. I think UChicago is fine with its top 20 med school.
@Chrchill - one could equally truthfully say that Yale beat UChicago in two out of the three major professional school categories. And it would mean equally little in assessing which of the two schools was somehow superior to the other.