<<<<<orphan .edu pages doesn't really help any more.
Exactly right........ Lets take an example. I pay some kid beer money for a page on his school hosting account. The page has no inbound links except from a directory of student sites. The url looks like this....
someschool.edu/~student
A link from that page is pretty much useless now. Used to be golden though. I had a whole network of these set up at one point and was not just using them for inbound links but was also setting up pages on the and using them to rank. (not adult)... Was like shooting fish in a barrel. I just advertised this little page around college related sites....
http://www.college-domains.info/
Now does this mean that a link from other types of .edu domains dont have mad juice? You can get some serious love from link from the right type of page.... If the linking page is well linked, especially from other .edu pages and is not buried away from the root it can have alot of power.