As I touched on earlier, different companies favor different types of applicants. At some companies, different hiring managers within the same company focus on completely different aspects. For example, I know one guy who is involved in hiring for a Silicon Valley tech company. He mentioned the first thing he does when evaluating resumes is looks for persons who served in the military and moves them to the front of the pack, especially ones in who have served in the marines (he is a former marine). When I was interviewing at another small SV company, one of the persons I interviewed with seemed be bragging about the huge portion of employees at that company that shared the same first name as the company’s founder. It was far too high to be random. They appeared to give strong preference to candidates with a particular first name.
While there are companies that focus candidates being from an “elite school” and various other criteria, in the survey of hundreds of employers I posted earlier, college reputation was ranked as the least important aspect of evaluating resumes of new grads, and relevant work experience related activities was rated as most important. This of course was not a uniform opinion across all employers. For employers that aren’t especially concerned with hiring from “elite colleges”, it makes sense to emphasize closer colleges for a variety of reasons including reduced hiring costs, candidates being more likely to favor living in the area, employers being especially familiar with the college, etc.