6
675015
I'm a college sports fan, and I follow recruiting. High school basketball and football players are ruthlessly evaluated and compared, and players from disparate parts of the country get ratings that are intended to delineate between the 11th best defensive lineman (who might be from Florida) and the 12th (who might be from California). They do this despite the reality that no scout can really watch these different guys. It can seem silly to differentiate 11 and 12, but you can be sure that the Alabamas and Oklahomas have rosters packed with guys rated highly, while the smaller football schools have few such recruits. Nevertheless, in the NFL draft, there are inevitably stars who come from these smaller schools.
In comparing psych programs, I don't see the real problem. This list of the 10 most elite places can be argued, but does anyone really think that this group of 10 is interchangeable with the residencies rated 40-49? The elite programs have deeper faculties, far more research money, better writing opportunities, and get many more of their top picks among resident applicants.
As with the transition from high schools to colleges and colleges to med school schools, there is a lot of movement, of course, and any of us can go up and down. Further, some of the best faculty and residents in the world thrive in programs that are viewed as mediocre, while all of the best places have their share of intellectual/personal duds, but if you're a betting person, I'd put my money on the places more highly ranked....
A. It's a horrible analogy if you look at the metrics for ranking athletes and the metric (an email poll to 300 people or so) or ranking residency programs.
B. Even your own metrics are silly. "Deeper facilities" (whatever that means... I assume you were somehow trying to stick with the sports analogies) and more research money and writing opportunities? Those latter two have nothing to do with how good a residency training program is unless you want to be an academic, which isn't the majority of doctors. The problem when rankings is when peoe use it as a surrogate to say "I know there are exceptions but doctors from program 6 are better trained than doctors from program 18"." Why? Because they had more basic science research? And FWIW, which is literally nothing's, I go to a "top ranked" place.