A ten-year retrospective analysis of medical school rankings in the United Kingdom

TL;DR

This paper analyzes UK medical school rankings over ten years to understand how different ranking systems compare and how they relate to overall university rankings.

Contribution

The study is the first to assess agreement between ranking systems for UK medical programs and their institutional rankings over a decade.

Findings

Ranking systems showed high agreement but notable variation in top institutions across systems.

A weak association exists between university overall rank and medical program rank.

Medical school rankings do not guarantee institutional overall rankings.

Abstract

National rankings are employed by higher education (HE) institutions to guide strategic decisions and by prospective applicants and their supporters to guide decisions about where to study. Given the increased marketisation of HE and the use of rankings in decision making, it is essential to understand the nuances of rankings: how different systems lead to different rankings, the correlation between rankings of high-profile programmes such as medicine and that of their institutions, and how rankings shift over time. To date, no studies have assessed agreement between ranking systems for medical programmes in the United Kingdom (UK). Given that various ranking systems are used globally to compare institutions within and across countries, a deeper understanding of these ranking systems is crucial.

Retrospective data across a ten-year period (2016–2025) were obtained on the national rankings of medicine programmes in the UK: the Complete University Guide, Guardian, and The Times. The data were analysed to investigate agreement in ranking of medical programmes over time and the agreement between overall ranking of an institution and the ranking of its medical programme.

Ranking systems showed a high level of agreement with each other. However, mean scores over the ten-year period varied by ranking system, whereby institutions occupying the ‘top three’ positions were not wholly consistent across systems. Associations between institutional rank and that of institutions’ medicine programmes were statistically significant (r = 0.36–0.38, p < 0.01).

Agreement between ranking systems for medical programmes in the UK is present, yet there remains notable variation for some institutions within those ranking systems, likely due to different components and weightings that make up these scores. The weak association between overall rank and medical ranks implies that the presence of a medical school at an institution does not guarantee a high overall rank – higher universities can have lower medical schools, and vice versa. This suggests that prospective students should consider an array of factors when deciding on where to study; not rankings alone.

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