[distances]

Thanks for the thoughtful reply, this makes sense to me: if you have books full of top qualifying candidates, it can be beneficial to have a secondary selection criteria.

I'm not familiar with an academic system like this so I can't really comment if it's giving good outcomes vs. purely academic selection. My country is small enough to have a single top tier university and multiple second level institutions, so I'm ingrained with the idea you should choose the best academic candidates from a limited applicant pool.