The University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) has been named among the top medical schools for primary care training in the new 2024 U.S. News & World Report rankings. The school was named a Tier 1 institution, which places it among the top 15 institutions in the nation for primary care training.

Instead of numerical rankings, U.S. News is now grouping medical schools into four tiers. Those institutions in the top tier were in the 85th percentile or higher of medical schools ranked.

Mark T. Gladwin, MD

“This is a tremendous accomplishment and a testament to our commitment to our core mission, which is to recruit and educate talented medical students who are representative of the Maryland population and eager to give back to their communities,” said Mark T. Gladwin, MD, who is the John Z. and Akiko K. Bowers Distinguished Professor and dean of UMSOM, and vice president for medical affairs at the University of Maryland, Baltimore. “We are particularly proud that more than 70 percent of our students come from Maryland, and nearly 40 percent choose to practice here in the state.”

UMSOM was also named a Tier 2 medical school for research, placing it among the top quartile of medical schools in the nation.

“Each school’s tier was derived from its overall score, calculated as always by summing the weighted normalized values generated across several factors of academic quality,” U.S. News stated on its website explaining the methodology of the rankings. For primary care rankings, they looked at medical school graduates practicing in primary care specialties, and those entering primary care residencies. For research rankings, they considered total research activity per faculty member, total National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grants, and average NIH research grants per faculty member.

Both sets of rankings also considered student selectivity, including MCAT scores, GPA, and acceptance rates, as well as faculty resources like faculty to student ratios.

“We are poised to soar to even greater heights as we work to lead research on generational health challenges and other emergent health priorities,” Gladwin said. “These new rankings are an indicator that we’re heading in the right direction, and now we must continue to build continuously across all our departments, institutes, and centers to become a national leader among medical schools.”