WordPress on .edu: 38.5% (22,372 sites) (Source: WebPulse Common Crawl scan, 7.37M+ detections. 58,182 .edu sites detected.)
The Data
Why Education Chose Drupal and Rails
Universities have IT departments — not freelancers. When MIT or Stanford chose Drupal, it was an institutional technology decision made by a committee that evaluated security, scalability, and multi-site management. Rails came in through CS departments that built tools in the language they taught. These are fundamentally different adoption patterns from the freelance-driven WordPress ecosystem.
The Rails Surprise
9,568 .edu sites on Rails is one of the most unexpected findings in our entire dataset. Rails barely registers on other TLDs. In education, it's the third most-used framework at 16.4%. The explanation: university CS programs that used Ruby/Rails in curricula built institutional tools on it. The framework choice followed the classroom.
