You’re an excellent undergraduate. You apply to lots of departments and get in everywhere. Your advisors tell you about the Leiter rankings, and you choose to go to a highly ranked department. If students tend to act like you, higher-ranked departments will have better incoming graduate students. In addition, one learns a great deal in graduate school from one’s peers, and graduate students at higher-ranked departments will generally get more out of their peers (since their peers were better coming in). So one would expect graduate students coming out of higher-ranked departments to be better—even if there is no correlation between the Leiter rankings and how good the faculty are at training graduate students. This is why I tell prospective graduate students to look at the Leiter rankings, and it’s why I take them into account in assessing applications. It’s not about prestige: it’s that I think that there’s reason to think that, other things being equal, students coming out of higher-ranked departments will be better. (This is a pretty weak claim and doesn’t justify chucking the file of someone from a non-Leiterrific department with three publications in Phil Studies in favor of the file of someone from a Leiterrific department with no publications. Not that I would do that.)
(PGOAT reminds me that, given my reasons for taking the Leiter rankings into account, I should pay attention to a department’s ranking over time, including when the student was deciding. But that’s a pain, so I tend to just assume that the rankings are more or less stable over time.)
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