UCSF Schools of Medicine and Nursing rank among nation's best in annual survey

By Wallace Ravven

UCSF’s School of Medicine and School of Nursing maintain their high national rankings in the new annual survey of the best graduate schools published by US News & World Report. Both rank in the top ten in the nation.

The rankings appear in the April 14 edition of the magazine and in the book, America’s Best Graduate Schools, both on newsstands April 7.

This year, UCSF is the only university that ranks in the top ten of both research-based and primary care medical schools. The UCSF School of Medicine ranks sixth nationally in the quality of its research training and third in the quality of its primary care training.

In the survey, UCSF also ranks among the top ten in most medical school specialty programs assessed, including first in AIDS and third in both internal medicine and women’s health.

“We are pleased to see the excellence of our medical training programs recognized, and to be distinguished for the breadth of this excellence in medical research, primary care and a range of specialties,” said Haile T. Debas, MD, dean of the UCSF School of Medicine and vice chancellor for medical affairs. “We continually strive to strengthen our ability to train the very best medical researchers and physicians.”

The survey rates the UCSF graduate program in nursing as second in the nation, and UCSF ranks in the top ten in seven of eight nursing specialties, including first in its family nurse practitioner program and second in its program for training adult/medical-surgical nurses.

“The innovative curriculum in the UCSF School of Nursing prepares superb nurse clinicians, educators and researchers during a time of dire shortage of nurses and nurse faculty,” said Kathleen Dracup, RN, DNS, dean of the UCSF School of Nursing. “It is heartening to see the quality of our teaching programs recognized nationally.”

The medical school rankings are based on assessments by medical school deans and senior faculty, admission test scores of students, ratio of faculty to students and other factors, including funding from the National Institutes of Health. The rankings in health disciplines, including nursing, are based on surveys of faculty, deans and other administrators.

The ten research-based medical schools ranked as the best are the following:

(1) Harvard, (2/tie) Johns Hopkins, Washington University in St. Louis, (4/tie) Duke, University of Pennsylvania, (6) UCSF, (7) Columbia, (8/tie) Stanford, University of Michigan, (10) Yale.

In the separate ranking of medical schools for the quality of their primary care training, UCSF ranked third behind University of Washington and Oregon Health and Science University.

In addition to its top rankings in the AIDS, women’s health and internal medicine training specialties, the UCSF medical school was rated fifth in pediatric training and sixth in training to treat drug/alcohol abuse.

Top-ranked specialty training programs in the UCSF School of Nursing, besides family nurse practitioner and adult/medical-surgical training, are: adult nurse practitioner and psychiatric/mental health (both ranked third nationally), pediatric nurse practitioner (4), gerontological/geriatric (5) and community/public health (9).

The survey ranked the top 10 master’s degree programs in nursing as follows:       

1) University of Washington, (2) UCSF, (3/tie) University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, (5) University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, (6/tie) Johns Hopkins, Oregon Health and Science University,  (8/tie) University of Illinois-Chicago, University of Iowa and (10/tie) UCLA, University of Maryland -Baltimore, University of Pittsburgh, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill (School of Public Health) and Yale.
Also ranking high in the national survey was the UCSF program in nursing-midwifery, administered with San Francisco General Hospital, which ties for seventh nationally, and the physical therapy program, run jointly with San Francisco State University, which ranks 15th in the nation in the new survey.

The new issue of US News also reprints rankings of doctoral programs from last year. UCSF’s doctoral programs in the biological sciences ties with two other institutions as the fifth best in the nation in that survey.

The rankings are:

1) Stanford, (2/tie) Harvard, MIT and UC Berkeley, (5/tie) UCSF, Caltech and Johns Hopkins, (8) Rockefeller University, (9/tie) Princeton, Scripps Research Institute and Yale.

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