On another webmaster forum, an experienced SEO'er said that the relevance of links is more important than the authority.
He explained it like thus.
There is an MIT .edu forum out there which has a pagerank of 9, indexed constantly, and generally considered to be pretty authorative when it comes to the topic of the forum (which, incidentally, I believe is MIT Collage Basketball), this chap - as an ex MIT student - was allowed to had an account and added his Forex trading site to the link.
What happened next was that his site went from being #10 in the SERPS to nowhere for his chosen keyword. Ironically though his site was getting hits for people searching about information on college basketball in MIT. What had happened is because google saw the links on an authorative forum and thought "Hmmmm....I know the page says forex, and the anchor says forex, but because this link is quite heavily on a site for college basketball in MIT, it's probably about that. There's very few links elsewhere!", and had adjusted accordingly. I think he got more traffic, but it was completely irrelevant traffic, and he scrapped the site as a "lesson learnt". (though it didn't stop domain droppers picking it up and trying to make a fortune from it!)
Relevance is key. It's probably more important than authority I'd say. Of course, relevance with authority is important, but there's very few "department of blogging" in governments and "university of blogging stuff". So my advice would be getting backlinks from authorative blogs in your niche, which is comment, link, trackback, email, that sort of thing!
Ironically, getting backlinks from domain names with education and governmental domain names is easy, it's a matter of picking up the phone to a relevant site, stating who you are, what you do, and say if you feel that the website you are offering is worthwhile, link to it.
It's also good if you manage to keep hold of your university web hosting account after you leave university...hehe...
