U.S. News & World Report released its 2025 list of top medical schools April 8, part of the outlet’s broader Best Graduate Schools rankings.
The media company produced two separately computed lists, one for research and one for primary care. For the research-oriented computation, U.S. News examined research productivity, faculty and admissions data for schools and placed them into four tiers, with tier 1 schools as the highest performing.
The data used in the total research activity and total research activity per faculty member ranking factors used for were expanded this year to include those from state, local and private sources, in addition to grants and contracts from federal sources, the media company said. The weights for these ranking factors did not change.
For the primary care computation, U.S. News also placed schools into four tiers based on two heavily factored metrics for graduates entering primary care fields.
Ultimately, there were 105 medical and osteopathic schools with eligible data for this year’s research-oriented computation, and 99 for the primary care computation.
“Compared with the previous edition of the rankings, 80% of the top 100 schools in both research and primary care were assessed, while the remaining 20% that declined to participate in the statistical survey were labeled as unranked,” said U.S. News. “For the second consecutive rankings, no medical schools were assessed solely on data reported in previous editions, unlike what was sometimes done in the 2023-2024 rankings edition.”
The highest-performing medical schools for 2025, in alphabetical order, are:
Tier 1 medical schools for research
- Baylor College of Medicine (Houston)
- Case Western Reserve University (Cleveland)
- Emory University (Atlanta)
- Donald and Barbara Zucker School of Medicine at Hofstra/Northwell (Hempstead, N.Y.)
- Mayo Clinic Alix School of Medicine (Rochester, Minn.)
- Ohio State University (Columbus)
- University of California Los Angeles David Geffen School of Medicine
- University of California San Diego
- University of California San Francisco
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- University of Pittsburgh
- University of Rochester (N.Y.)
- University of South Florida Morsani College of Medicine (Tampa)
- University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas)
- Vanderbilt University (Nashville, Tenn.)
- Yale University (New Haven, Conn.)
Tier 1 medical schools for primary care
- East Carolina University Brody School of Medicine (Greenville, N.C.)
- East Tennessee State University Quillen College of Medicine (Johnson City)
- Saint Louis University
- Texas A&M University (College Station)
- Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center (Lubbock)
- UMass Chan Medical School (Worcester)
- University of Arizona-Tucson
- University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences (Little Rock)
- University of California Davis
- University of California San Francisco
- University of Hawaii-Manoa John A. Burns School of Medicine (Honolulu)
- University of Kansas Medical Center (Kansas City)
- University of Minnesota (Minneapolis)
- University of New Mexico (Albuquerque)
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
- Western University of Health Sciences (Pomona, Calif.)
Read more about the methodology here.
