Since, well, forever, links from .edu's have been considered the pot o' gold to super-happy search engine rankings. And since most .edu's are willing to add employment sites to theirs, savvy job boards are prone to put on the full-court press to get such sites.

Now, don't get me wrong, links from .edu's aren't a bad thing. However, in light of recent comments by Google's Matt Cutts, saying that no extra weight is given to any TLD in their eyes, I've began to rethink my views on .edu links.

Some negatives:

1. Bad anchor text. Very few .edu's link to sites with requested, customized copy.
2. Poor structure. Most .edu's will link to job sites in a laundry list fashion, which I believe is less advantageous than links within main body copy.
3. Sharing the love. Colleges with Web pages set-up with links to job sites usually have a plethora of URLs, which arguably devalues them. Less is more.
   
4. Time. The great equalizer is everyone's 24 hr. day. The time, energy and effort to obtain links from .edu's are many times better spent elsewhere.

Again, I'm not anti-.edu. I merely think SEO's need to look at them more as another source of quality links and not some high-rankings panacea.