This is not specifically related to your field but I had a friend in mechanical engineering program , who got into Carnegie Mellon (Rank 11) Univerity of Illinois Urbana C ( Rank 7) but he did not get into many lower ranked college . So it all depends on your research interest that closely matches with university's requirement.
Another thing I have seen is Letter of Recommendation are HUGE! I know people that sucked academically and got into good program because the professors who wrote reco were previous department head or related in some way to the program applied.