\n\nOne notable feature is that many of these are large research universities, where many of the Stack Overflow askers may be graduate students or other academic researchers.\n\nAs you might guess, the percentage of questions from universities depends dramatically on the time of year, based on whether most schools are in session:\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/percent_school_week_graph-1-675x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"675\" height=\"675\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-8886\" />\n\nNotice that the percentage of questions coming from universities drops not only during the summer, but also at several typical school holidays: the start/end of the year (winter break), spring break in March, and Thanksgiving break at the end of November. The rate is also nicely consistent across the three years.\n\n\u003Ch1>What Tags Tend to be Asked about from Schools?\u003C/h1>\n\nEach Stack Overflow question comes with one or more tags describing the languages and technologies it is asking about. What tags were most likely, or least likely, to come from a university?\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/by_tag_uni_plot-1-788x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"788\" height=\"675\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-8887\" />\n\nWe can see three types of questions that tend to get asked from universities. First are languages and frameworks used in academic research, such as numpy, R and (especially) MATLAB. Next are low-level languages such as C and C++, which may be used in introductory programming and operating systems classes; my first college class was taught in C. We can also see questions about algorithms and data structures, such as \"algorithm\", \"loops\", \"list\", and \"arrays\".\n\nAmong the tags least likely to be asked from universities are Microsoft technologies, such as C#, .NET, WPF and SQL Server. This makes sense since those generally tend to be popular in enterprise businesses rather than educational and research contexts.\n\nHow can we confirm our hypothesis that some tags, such as R and MATLAB, are asked by university researchers, while others are asked by undergraduate students? Let’s look at when they're asked from universities during the year. As we saw earlier, undergraduates generally ask questions mostly during the typical fall and spring semesters, while researchers likely work and ask year-round.\n\nHere are the seasonal trends for six selected tags.\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/seasonal_trends-1.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"504\" height=\"504\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-8888\" />\n\nMany Java questions are asked from universities during the fall and spring, but they drop to barely a third of that level during the summer. C and C++ also appear to be mainly asked by students on a semester schedule. In contrast, R and MATLAB are pretty consistent throughout the year, with 25% or 40%, respectively, of their questions getting answered from universities no matter the month (with the exception of the winter break).\n\nBesides the distribution across the year, tags also aren't evenly distributed among US universities. For example, in American universities, the choice of programming languages differs between public and private universities.\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/public_private_graph-1-675x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"675\" height=\"675\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-8889\" />\n\nMicrosoft technologies like C#, ASP.NET, VBA and SQL Server were more commonly asked from public universities, while cloud technologies like Heroku and AWS, as well as web frameworks like Django and Flask, were more commonly asked from private universities.\n\nSince I program in R, I was also curious what universities had the greatest amount of R. (So as to avoid having one student disproportionately affect their school's tags, we measured the percentage of users who had asked from a school who had ever asked about R).\n\n\u003Cimg src=\"https://stackoverflow.blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/r_by_school-1-844x675.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"844\" height=\"675\" class=\"alignnone size-large wp-image-8890\" />\n\n(Note that Australia had only 7 universities with at least 200 askers). The most R-heavy schools included a mix of public and private research universities, and some are recognizable as having prominent statistics programs.\n\nThis analysis gives a sense of how students use Stack Overflow differently from professional developers. In future posts we'll look deeper into this data, including considering how students differ in what questions they answer or visit, and examining how this relates to tags most visited on weekends. Whether you're a student or not, you can support others' education by \u003Ca href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/users/signup\">signing up for Stack Overflow\u003C/a> and contributing today.\n\nIf you're a student looking for your first job, check out the latest \u003Ca href=\"https://stackoverflow.com/jobs/junior-developer-jobs?utm_source=so-owned&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=dev-c4al&utm_content=c4al-link\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">listings for entry-level programmers\u003C/a>.","html","2017-02-15T18:55:56.000Z",{"current":229},"how-do-students-use-stack-overflow",[231,239],{"_createdAt":232,"_id":233,"_rev":234,"_type":235,"_updatedAt":232,"slug":236,"title":238},"2023-05-23T16:43:21Z","wp-tagcat-company","9HpbCsT2tq0xwozQfkc4ih","blogTag",{"current":237},"company","Company",{"_createdAt":232,"_id":240,"_rev":234,"_type":235,"_updatedAt":232,"slug":241,"title":243},"wp-tagcat-insights",{"current":242},"insights","Insights","How Do Students Use Stack Overflow?",[246,252,258,264],{"_id":247,"publishedAt":248,"slug":249,"sponsored":12,"title":251},"370eca08-3da8-4a13-b71e-5ab04e7d1f8b","2025-08-28T16:00:00.000Z",{"_type":10,"current":250},"moving-the-public-stack-overflow-sites-to-the-cloud-part-1","Moving the public Stack Overflow sites to the cloud: Part 1",{"_id":253,"publishedAt":254,"slug":255,"sponsored":218,"title":257},"e10457b6-a9f6-4aa9-90f2-d9e04eb77b7c","2025-08-27T04:40:00.000Z",{"_type":10,"current":256},"from-punch-cards-to-prompts-a-history-of-how-software-got-better","From punch cards to prompts: a history of how software got better",{"_id":259,"publishedAt":260,"slug":261,"sponsored":12,"title":263},"65472515-0b62-40d1-8b79-a62bdd2f508a","2025-08-25T16:00:00.000Z",{"_type":10,"current":262},"making-continuous-learning-work-at-work","Making continuous learning work at work",{"_id":265,"publishedAt":266,"slug":267,"sponsored":12,"title":269},"1b0bdf8c-5558-4631-80ca-40cb8e54b571","2025-08-21T14:00:25.054Z",{"_type":10,"current":268},"research-roadmap-update-august-2025","Research roadmap update, August 2025",{"count":271,"lastTimestamp":272},157,"2023-05-25T09:45:54Z",["Reactive",274],{"$sarticleModal":275},false,["Set"],["ShallowReactive",278],{"sanity-rO7WJLtoDrxBEj3rebPK8MPOcJYJgZDhuewaxYCeHqE":-1,"sanity-comment-wp-post-6566-1756406946110":-1},"/2017/02/15/how-do-students-use-stack-overflow"]