Rankings are dangerous. Each person's criteria has to be different: location (proximity to loved ones, nature and/or cities), specific research projects and mentors you might want, culture and supportiveness of faculty/admins/fellow students, cost of attendance, matches into specific residency programs/locations you might want, what have you. A falsely objective number distorts the motivations and short-circuits the due diligence of both medical schools and students in ways that may be harmful.

Everyone takes the same medical licensing exams. Students at even high-ranking institutions claim to not attend class regularly and instead study with online, standardized tools. There is no shortage of research opportunities whether your medical school pulls in $25M or $500M in NIH funding - and for the less funded labs, you might actually be doing more. Less prestigious institutions also tend to have fewer fellows and residents at their clinical rotation sites, paradoxically providing more hands-on exposure than higher-ranked programs may be able to offer. As a practicing physician, most will be working alongside providers from all different medical schools - doing the same work, pulling the same salary, practicing with similar competence.

We spent four years convincing everyone that we want to help those less fortunate and/or lower achieving, only to fight to stratify ourselves by fortune and achievement in an arguably zero-sum game. Extrinsic motivations drive us to treat medical school as a status signifier endowing us with value we already have, clawing after some notion of objectivity too simple for complex reality. But if the status seeking pushes us to work harder, it also risks harming the quality of our lives, strength of our communities, and genuineness of our work. All that matters is this: Will I be fulfilled here? Can I achieve my aims from here?