By Laura Kurtzman and Nicholas Roznovsky
UCSF's Mission Bay campus
UC San Francisco's psychiatry program has been ranked fifth in the nation in U.S. News & World Report's annual survey of the best graduate and professional schools. For the third consecutive year, UCSF is also the top public university for graduate and professional psychiatry programs in the United States.
U.S. News' 2022 rankings for medical specialty areas are based on ratings made by medical school deans and senior faculty at peer institutions who are asked to identify up to 15 schools offering the best programs in each specialty. This is only the fourth consecutive year that U.S. News has included psychiatry as a specialty ranking for medical schools, and UCSF has been included in the top five schools in each of those years.
As a whole, UCSF’s School of Medicine received top ratings in this year’s medical school rankings. UCSF tied for fourth in research and was second in primary care, making it the only medical school in the country to place in the top five for both categories.
This year, U.S. News included a new diversity ranking, and UCSF was among four University of California medical schools to rank in the top 10. UC Davis was fourth, UC Riverside was sixth, and UCSF tied with UCLA for ninth.
For the third year in a row, UCSF was also the only medical school ranked in the top five in all of the specialty areas covered in the survey: anesthesiology, family medicine, internal medicine, obstetrics and gynecology, pediatrics, psychiatry, radiology, and surgery.
“I would like to thank our faculty, staff, and learners for the outstanding work they do every day — but especially during these unprecedented and challenging times — to make the UCSF School of Medicine such an exceptional place to work, teach, learn, and discover,” said Talmadge E. King Jr., MD, dean of the School of Medicine.
“These rankings are a point of pride and an important recognition of that work,” King continued. “The real yardstick by which we measure our success is the impact we have had in transforming education for the physicians and scientists of the future, advancing cutting-edge research, and delivering high-quality, compassionate, and equitable care to patients,” he said. “Our performance in the new Diversity Index, which represents the goal of increasing access to medical education, is an important measure of the continued work we are doing to improve diversity, equity, and inclusion at the UCSF School of Medicine.”
The UCSF School of Nursing's psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner program was also ranked fifth nationally in its category this year.
The U.S. News rankings are based on data provided by schools, as well as information from surveys of school leaders. Other factors include the amount of funding that faculty receive from the National Institutes of Health; the rates at which graduates enter primary care residencies in family practice, pediatrics and internal medicine; how selective each school is in admitting students; and the ratio of full-time science and clinical faculty to medical students. Medical specialty areas are ranked based on ratings made by medical school deans and senior faculty at peer institutions.
The new diversity ranking is based on the proportion of students who come from groups that are underrepresented in medicine (URM), and for public schools like UCSF, how that compares to a state’s population. URMs include students who are Black or African American, Hispanic/Latino, American Indian or Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander.
The rankings are published in the magazine’s 2022 issue of “Best Graduate Schools.”
About UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences
The UCSF Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences and the Langley Porter Psychiatric Institute are among the nation's foremost resources in the fields of child, adolescent, adult, and geriatric mental health. Together they constitute one of the largest departments in the UCSF School of Medicine and the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, with a mission focused on research (basic, translational, clinical), teaching, patient care, and public service.
UCSF Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences conducts its clinical, educational, and research efforts at a variety of locations in Northern California, including Langley Porter Psychiatric Hospital; UCSF Medical Centers at Parnassus Heights, Mission Bay, and Mount Zion; UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland; Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center; the San Francisco VA Health Care System; UCSF Fresno; and numerous community-based sites around the San Francisco Bay Area.
About the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences
The UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences, established by the extraordinary generosity of Joan and Sanford I. "Sandy" Weill, brings together world-class researchers with top-ranked physicians to solve some of the most complex challenges in the human brain.
The UCSF Weill Institute leverages UCSF’s unrivaled bench-to-bedside excellence in the neurosciences. It unites three UCSF departments—Neurology, Psychiatry, and Neurological Surgery—that are highly esteemed for both patient care and research, as well as the Neuroscience Graduate Program, a cross-disciplinary alliance of nearly 100 UCSF faculty members from 15 basic-science departments, as well as the UCSF Institute for Neurodegenerative Diseases, a multidisciplinary research center focused on finding effective treatments for Alzheimer’s disease, frontotemporal dementia, Parkinson’s disease, and other neurodegenerative disorders.
About UCSF
The University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) is exclusively focused on the health sciences and is dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. UCSF Health, which serves as UCSF’s primary academic medical center, includes top-ranked specialty hospitals and other clinical programs, and has affiliations throughout the Bay Area.
