The Data
44% (781 sites)
WordPress on .edu
Source: WebPulse Common Crawl WARC scan.
34% (607 sites)
Drupal on .edu
Source: WebPulse WARC scan.
13% (237 sites)
Rails on .edu
Source: WebPulse WARC scan.
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
237 .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. The explanation: university CS programs that used Ruby/Rails in curricula built institutional tools on it. The framework choice followed the classroom.
