The South appears poised to become the new center of medical education across the country as the battle over diversity, equity, and inclusion continues to rage through academia.
Watchdog organization Do No Harm released its second annual ranking of medical schools on Thursday, evaluating schools based on their embrace of merit-based standards versus DEI. The ranking, first shared with The Daily Wire, shows medical schools in states with stringent DEI bans differentiating themselves from states that have identity politics embedded in their education systems.
“DEI and excellence are concepts that are inherently at odds and in conflict with one another,” Do No Harm’s Ian Kingsbury told The Daily Wire. “So the more the school embraces DEI, the less they embrace merit and excellence.”
Do No Harm evaluated nearly every medical school across the country on the quality of students admitted, commitment to DEI, and transparency in evaluating student performance. The rankings revealed that many schools in southern states, where Republican lawmakers have pushed to ban DEI, are rising to the top.
The release of the second annual ranking comes as the Trump administration wages a national war on DEI programs in educational institutions across the country. While some states have fought the administration and pushed to maintain DEI, others appear to be complying with the push to abandon identity politics.
Kingsbury, the director of Do No Harm’s Center for Accountability in Medicine, told The Daily Wire that a clear pattern was emerging across the country of schools in states where leaders have fought DEI.
“What we see is that for the most part, the public red state universities in those states that have passed good anti-DEI legislation, especially Florida and Texas, that most of those schools do appear to be compliant and appear to have extirpated DEI,” he said.
Five of the top 10 schools that award doctorates in medicine are state schools located in Florida or Texas. The report found that red state medical schools were less likely to have a formal DEI office while maintaining rigorous grading systems and selective academic standards.
The number one ranked school for the second year in a row was the University of South Florida’s Health Morsani College of Medicine in Tampa.
“They are right at the top because they have consciously made a decision that they’re not going to engage in this identity politicking, and that they’re in fact going to take their best applicants,” Kingsbury said.
Two of the other top five schools are also in southern red states: the University of Texas at Austin Dell Medical School and Vanderbilt University School of Medicine in Tennessee. The other schools that made it into the top five were the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York and the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.
Those schools are ahead of traditional powerhouse schools like Harvard Medical School (53) and Stanford University School of Medicine (61).
“Medical education shapes the physicians who will care for Americans for decades. Schools that prioritize cognitive excellence, reject commitments to DEI, and maintain transparent standards of student performance serve patients best,” a Do No Harm report that accompanied the rankings said.
At the bottom of Do No Harm’s rankings were the Roseman University College of Medicine, the University of California-Riverside School of Medicine, the California University of Science and Medicine, the Charles R. Drew University of Medicine and Science, and Michigan State University College of Human Medicine.
Some schools are expected to improve their standings as states adopt new policies. For example, the LSU School of Medicine in Shreveport is expected to rise thanks to a new state law mandating that it adopt differentiated and multi-tier grading.
“We want this to be a resource to patients [and] to lawmakers who are concerned about the state of medical education and want to know how to improve things in their state,” Kingsbury said. “We hope that they look to these rankings as a roadmap.”
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