Regarding the effect of college ranking on medical school admission, posts 10-11 of Confessions of a Med School App Reader may be of interest.
The poster doing medical school application reading seemingly gave very minor importance to college ranking per se (except for students applying from post-bacc pre-med programs), but did note that a top-end recommendation from a top ranked college could carry extra weight. But they also mentioned that “if the academics are there, I’m not really parsing much there. I’m using the other parts of the app a lot more.”