Dakota Q. Bates used to spend his hourlong commute to college watching the hills and cattle roll by. Steering a 10-year-old Dodge Ram pickup, the 21-year-old drove four days a week from his home just outside Alton, Mo., to Missouri State University at West Plains, passing nearly 40 miles of green farmland in steadfast pursuit of an associate degree from the two-year institution. “I’d listen to the radio, roll down the windows, and just drive,” Mr. Bates says.
He made the drive twice each day, leaving early in the morning to make his 8 a.m. class and staying on campus until late in the evening. It wasn’t that he was in class all day. He stayed to complete online research and Web-based assignments. Living five miles beyond the reach of broadband in his area, he lacked high-speed Internet at home.
To get his work done, Mr. Bates relied on the computers on campus. He says he often didn’t leave until 9 o’clock at night. “It put a lot of stress on me,” he says.
Additionally, he often didn’t know about events and information shared on social-media sites like Facebook. “That was probably the biggest thing I was missing out on,” Mr. Bates says. “I kind of felt out of the loop, if you will.”
Mr. Bates’s experience is not unique. Some 19 million Americans lack access to high-speed Internet service, according to a 2012 report from the Federal Communications Commission. And there’s a significant access gap between residents of urban and rural areas. The FCC’s data show that while only 1.8 percent of urban residents lacked access to broadband, nearly 24 percent of rural Americans live where high-speed access is unavailable.
In an era when education increasingly takes place online, broadband Internet access is a basic necessity for students, says Tom M. Koutsky, chief policy counsel at Connected Nation, a nonprofit that works to expand such access in the United States. Students today are minimally expected to perform research and submit assignments online, and they need reliable, fast Internet access to do so, he says.
Over all, according to the FCC, 6 percent of Americans do not have broadband available in their area. Of even greater concern, Mr. Koutsky says, is that 30 percent of Americans who do have access to high-speed Internet have not signed up, often because it is prohibitively expensive for them.
Colleges in areas without high-speed home Internet service rack up costs of their own, often going to unusual lengths to help students and local residents get online. Many offer extended library and computer-lab hours as well as training sessions and online support for those who might not be as technologically savvy. Turtle Mountain Community College, a tribal institution serving the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians in rural North Dakota, even provides courses for members of its impoverished community on how to use the Internet.
Amber Bailey, a student at Turtle Mountain, is among those for whom home Internet access is just too expensive, A 30-year-old single mother of two, Ms. Bailey says she is struggling with more immediate concerns.
“I’m working part-time and I have other bills I need to pay,” she says. “Internet is not one of my important bills.” To get online when she’s not on campus, she goes to her mother’s house, but even there the connection is slow.
Ms. Bailey hopes to one day open a gym for her community, which suffers from an unemployment rate close to 70 percent. She says that some classmates also struggle to connect at home, and that many of her teachers are lenient with deadlines because they know students might not be able to use the Internet or submit assignments online by the due date.
Broadband gaps such as these could become economic and social chasms as more and more educational opportunities move online. “The costs of digital exclusion are increasing,” Mr. Koutsky says. “Not having access to advanced education tools and software is going to have a significant effect on student achievement.”
‘The World-Wide Wait’
Roy Silver is a professor of sociology at Southeast Kentucky Community and Technical College, a rural institution in an impoverished region. He knows all too well how a lack of Internet access can get in the way of learning.
Many of Mr. Silver’s students don’t have access to the Web. He estimates that about 20 percent use dial-up connections, while another 20 percent don’t have connections at all. With few coffee shops or local restaurants nearby that offer free Internet access, he says, many of his students show up early or stay late on campus to use the computing services the college provides.
Mr. Silver recalled a student who had to take courses online to complete her degree. She would start to download her assignment on her home computer, leave to do laundry, and then come back to see whether the download was complete. If you don’t have a high-speed connection, Mr. Silver says, “the World Wide Web is turned into the world-wide wait.”
Because they don’t have broadband at home, Mr. Silver says, many of his students are behind when it comes to Internet basics, such as knowing how to perform online searches.
That’s been an issue for Ms. Bailey. When she enrolled in Turtle Mountain Community College after several years out of school, she says, she felt lost when it came to using the Internet. Although she knew how to type and print documents, she struggled to do research or understand how to use various online search engines. She took a computer-literacy course to improve her skills but says she still feels like she’s behind her more technologically savvy peers.
Theresa Osborne, an instructor of Appalachian and folk studies at Southeast Kentucky, has taught students who, like Ms. Bailey, come to class largely unfamiliar with the Internet. Ms. Osborne regularly meets with students individually to show them how to log into Blackboard, the college’s learning-management system, or use the library’s search engine. She estimates that about 10 to 25 percent of her students lack Internet at home.
The federal government recognizes the economic importance of getting more Americans online. The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 included $250-million for increasing broadband use among Americans who have not yet adopted the technology.
The Federal Communications Commission has also made moves to expand broadband in rural areas. Two years ago, the FCC announced its Connect America Fund, aimed at making sure all households have access to a basic level of broadband service. The $4.5-billion fund has so far invested $115-million to bring service to nearly 400,000 Americans and another $300-million for mobile broadband on rural roads that are now unserved.
Turtle Mountain feels the effects of lack of Internet access sharply, says James L. Davis, the college’s president. Many of its 1,325 students are just scraping by and can barely afford classes, much less a computer and Internet access, he says. Mr. Davis estimates that about 50 percent of Turtle Mountain students lack Internet at home but says the college is limited in what it can afford to provide.
Congress, he says, has authorized Turtle Mountain to receive $8,000 per student, but the college has never seen more than $6,000. “If we were getting $8,000 per student we would probably have much more access than we have now,” he says. “We would be able to provide a better service in terms of academic education and training to our population. It would be a big key to reducing poverty and reducing unemployment.”
Getting Faster
In other regions, there are signs that things are improving. In Massachusetts, a $71.6-million state-federal effort called MassBroadband 123 is bringing high-speed Internet access to more than 120 communities in western and north-central areas of the state, via more than 1,200 miles of fiber-optic cable. The first phase of the project will be completed later this year.
The project has already been crucial to improving educational opportunities for students in the region, says Robert L. Pura, president of Greenfield Community College, in northern Massachusetts. Even if some individual households still struggle to connect, the growing availability of high-speed Internet has had an enormous impact on his college, he says, as more students can get access to the Internet in libraries and other public spaces closer to their homes.
Once instructors were confident that the Internet capabilities of their students had increased, “faculty did not spare their creative juices” in thinking of different ways technology could be integrated into the curriculum, Mr. Pura says, including taping their lectures and putting them online. “All of those creative opportunities that exist in the classroom are now made more available to students.”
But Michael Assaf, Greenfield’s chief information officer, says that 20 to 25 percent of Greenfield’s students still live in areas that have only dial-up or limited mobile service. Students at Greenfield often find themselves competing for computer access on campus, not only with other students but also with members of the community who are invited to use the campus’s high-speed Internet.
“I see people coming to the cafeteria from the community and wonder if they’re students,” Mr. Assaf says. They tell him, “I’m here to pay my bills online.”
Katharine A. Eneguess, president of White Mountains Community College, in New Hampshire, has even seen local journalists set up shop in her campus’s library if their own Internet is not working. She says that White Mountains is a hub for Internet access in the community, and knows of students who commute from 75 to 100 miles away. Until recently, nearly half of county residents did not have anything but dial-up, she says.
However, thanks to a $44.5-million grant from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, about 700 New Hampshire institutions and 12,000 businesses will receive improved access to broadband. By the end of the year, the White Mountains campus will have tripled its broadband capacity, Ms. Eneguess says.
Lack of access among the students and faculty “affects everything,” she says. It even affects what the college can put on its Web site, as so many do not have Internet at the speeds necessary to view an interactive, robust site.
Sometimes, however, students themselves help each other bridge the digital divide. In July 2012, Mr. Bates and his family moved from Alton to West Plains, and he no longer has to make a long daily commute. Now he has access to high-speed Internet and can work on assignments at home. Because he knows “how big of a challenge it is,” Mr. Bates says he frequently invites friends and classmates over to use the computer at his house and stay the night if they need to.
Now president of the student government association at West Plains, Mr. Bates plans to get his bachelor’s degree in public relations and eventually a master’s in student affairs. One day, he even hopes to get a Ph.D. and become a dean of students at a university. He says he would never be able to complete his education without high-speed Internet.
“Everything is going more towards a technological world,” he says. “I think as a society it’s one of those big deals. It’s something we’ve got to keep up with.”