Why are .EDU links so valued by Google?

I have been thinking about this recently. A lot of people who do SEO say .edu links are so much more valued by Google than .com. I agree and would never argue against that because I have personal experience witnessing how effective .edu links are on numerous occasions. I've never really wondered why Google values them so much and just always assumed that they just do since they are sites that are managed by educational institutions, they are a lot less likely to have spam than a random .com managed by a random person.

I was analyzing the majority of .edu links I have used in the past for building backlinks and realize that not a single domain is less than 15 years old. All of them are at least nearly 2 decades old or even older than that. I started to think that maybe the .edu part of a .edu domain is no better than a .com to Google, but it is the fact that nearly all .edu domains are extremely old and age plays a role in SEO. What do you think about this?

That could be a factor, but I am not sure that is the main factor. I always thought it was because of the purpose of the site and the fact that the edu domain is special and respected. Wiki links are good too and they are not that old.

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Originally Posted by AaronLuke

I started to think that maybe the .edu part of a .edu domain is no better than a .com to Google, but it is the fact that nearly all .edu domains are extremely old and age plays a role in SEO. What do you think about this?

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That's it, the .edu ending iiself gives zero extra value to a link, nada, none. The source of this seo myth is exactly what you are saying: They are old, they are linked from many other highly trusted sites, Google sees these sites as high authorities. So, having a link on a popular internally linked part of some .edu site is great, but orphan .edu pages like forum profiles aren't different from profiles on thisisanabandonedcrappyforumthatcanbespammed.ws