I know a website that has more then 20 .edu domains pointing to it but the website ranks no way near the top results for the keyword it has in its title.
Just .edu links won't help. If they are from SPAMMED-TO-DEATH blogs there is even no reason to try ranking it and expect those to help you
The value of .edu links is not so much that they are .edu ones. Their real value comes from the fact that many (not all) .edu colleges/universities/organizations are long-established and of very high authority — for example, harvard.edu or stanford.edu. It's not so much the .edu, but the "Stanford" or "Harvard" part that gives great value to the link. Get a few of those and your rankings will undoubtedly rise. However, there are a lot of very lightweight organizations using .edu that bring no more link value than does a link from a .com or .org or whatever.
I dont think .edu losing their significance as I have seen many .edu website have higher traffic and ranking in Google. Adding valuable information through blogs will definitely increase your site traffic and ranks.
that means .edu alone doesn't has any signifance in terms of backlinks. but all the so called seo experts used to say before that all you need to get in top results is to have few .edu backlinks
Right — .edu alone is not the key. The organizations that have .edu websites quite often are very high-quality universities. A link from elite schools will of course carry a lot of weight, but that's because they are elite schools, not because they have a .edu in their url.
Edu & Gov links will be marked as spam by Google soon because now everyone creating these backlinks in spam like 1k edu backlinks in 1 day.
NO .edu extensions are not losing their power. An edu link is an edu link, doesn't matter if it's an Ivy league school or not. Some .edu domains are more powerful than others just like some .com's are. Depends on all the regular factors (PR, DA/PA, CF, TF, TBL, etc) as any other site/domain. The site you're talking about probably has no On-page SEO, crap content, spammy links, slow page loading, etc
Having links from .edu sites won't be enough to make it rank, the site must also have reliable contents to it. I wonder why the site got edu links in the first place.