UW News

April 3, 2008

UW schools of health sciences rank at top of annual poll

U.S. News & World Report has ranked programs in the UW schools of medicine, social work, and pharmacy in the top tier of its survey of best graduate and professional programs in the nation.


The School of Medicine was ranked the No. 1 medical school in the nation for training primary care physicians. This is the 15th consecutive year that the medical school has remained at the top of the list. The magazine’s annual ranking of graduate and professional schools was released last week. The family medicine and rural medicine programs also ranked No. 1 in their categories for the 17th consecutive year.



The U.S. News rankings, which consider peer assessments, rankings by residency program directors, National Institutes of Health funding, and other factors, assign just two overall rankings for medical schools: one for biomedical research and the other for primary care. The UW and Harvard University were the only two medical schools in the nation to rank in the top seven for excellence in both of these areas.


In NIH funding, the UW School of Medicine was again second only to Harvard among all U.S. medical schools in grant funding from the NIH. UW Medicine faculty received $579.7 million in NIH funding in 2007 — $93 million above the third-ranked school in this category, the University of Pennsylvania.


The UW School of Medicine again had the distinction of being the only medical school in the nation ranked in the top 10 in all specialties in the annual survey. In addition to top rankings in family medicine and rural health, the school was No. 4 for teaching students about AIDS, No. 6 in internal medicine, No. 7 in three specialties: geriatrics, pediatrics (tied with Washington University in St. Louis and up from No. 8 last year), and women’s health (up from No. 10 last year), and No. 8 in drug/alcohol abuse (up from No. 10 last year).


The master’s degree program in occupational therapy in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine was ranked No. 9 in a tie with New York University and the University of Pittsburgh. In disciplines that the UW School of Medicine shares with other UW schools and colleges, the UW ranked No. 5 in the nation in biomedical/bioengineering.

Other health sciences schools in the top of the rankings were the UW School of Social Work, ranked at No. 4; and the UW School of Pharmacy, ranked at No. 5.  




For a complete list of the rankings, visit U.S. News & World Report Web site at http://grad-schools.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/grad.