For most college students, place matters. And closer is often better. In 2016, almost 40 percent of first-time, full-time freshmen
reported that their colleges were less than 50 miles from their homes, a proportion that has held
since the 1980s. Studying close to home, family, and community can be even more vital for the roughly
one in four undergraduate students who are considered nontraditional — those who are older, have child-care duties, work full time, or attend college part time.
But what happens when there’s no college nearby? That’s still the case in substantial pockets of the country. Areas where it’s difficult for placebound students to get to a college — commonly known as education deserts — have drawn more attention in recent years, but there’s still much to be learned about their breadth and their impact.
We wanted to learn more. If colleges and policy makers fail to consider the impact of education deserts, they will fail to engage a large pool of potential students. That may reinforce the inequality that higher education hopes to solve.
The first step in eliminating education deserts is finding them. Existing research into education deserts is so limited that there isn’t a broadly accepted definition of what constitutes one. So The Chronicle ran its own analysis. We started by identifying almost 1,500 two- and four-year public colleges. (For our analysis, we excluded institutions with an acceptance rate lower than 30 percent: These colleges wouldn’t be considered viable options by many local students.)
Like the authors of
several
recent
studies, we then defined the areas each college serves. To do so, we calculated driving distance: If students who live or work off campus could drive to it within 60 minutes, we considered them in range.
We then looked to census block groups, geographical units for which the U.S. Census publishes useful demographic data. Block groups beyond any college’s driving radius were considered education deserts.
So how many adult Americans live in education deserts? The Chronicle’s analysis found that 11.2-million adults, or 3.5 percent of the adult population, live more than a 60-minute drive from a public college.
Areas of the country that qualify as education deserts under our definition are largely rural and predominantly in the West. Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, and Montana, in that order, have the greatest percentage of adults living more than 60 minutes from a college.
Let’s take a closer look at Montana. Although the state has a host of public four-year and community colleges serving most of its major cities and towns, the distances between population centers in Big Sky Country leaves one in three Montanans more than a 60-minute drive from a college.
Nationally, what do we know about the people who live in these deserts? Over three-fourths of them are white. That’s a disproportionate amount: White Americans constituted only 62 percent of the population in 2016.
The forced migration of Native Americans has left many of them clustered in areas that are far from population centers — and from higher education.
Our analysis showed that 29.5 percent of all Native Americans live more than 60 minutes’ drive from a college. Compared with white Americans, Native American adults are more than five times more likely to live in an education desert. Native Americans face plenty of
challenges to higher education; simply getting to a campus could be a major impediment for many.
Especially since the Great Recession, Americans living in rural areas have been left behind in income, assets, and health. They’re also more likely to live in an education desert. Whether it’s correlation or causation, a college education is linked to higher earnings, better employment rates, and overall well-being.
The median household earning for those living in education deserts is $47,368. In nondesert areas, that value increases to $53,844.
Living in an education desert also means you’re slightly more likely to live in poverty. In areas 60 minutes or more from a college, 12.8 percent of adults live below the poverty line. Live within 60 minutes of a college, and that proportion drops to 11.4 percent.
What would it take to make sure that distance doesn’t prevent students from obtaining a college degree? Making geography a bigger part of the conversation about college fit would be a start, according
to Nicholas Hillman, an associate professor of educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, who has studied education deserts extensively. Colleges and state and federal governments often encourage prospective students to factor financial aid, graduates’ earnings, and institutional culture into their decisions. But for students who live in these deserts, proximity and access can be the most important factors. Experts say that easier transfer requirements, partnerships between public colleges and selective colleges in underserved areas,
more-aggressive rural recruitment,
and even shuttle services could help ease the burden on desertbound students.
Lawmakers, meanwhile, could direct more money to rural institutions to help level the playing field
and create a geographically diverse college landscape. They could also work to decrease broadband
costs and expand access to rural areas, allowing students in deserts to benefit from online-learning options that may now be unreliable.
Educators and lawmakers still need to know more about the areas of the country that are underserved by higher education. Until the geographic obstacles to attending college are better understood, and more widely discussed, a class of disadvantaged students will remain just that.
METHODOLOGY
For our analysis, we included two-year associate-degree-granting community colleges and four-year baccalaureate-granting public and tribal colleges in the
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System 2016 academic-year universe. For four-year colleges, we excluded those that reported less than a 30-percent admittance rate. Block group-level Census data are from the
2016 American Community Survey. Block groups were considered education deserts if less than half of their geographic area was covered by the 60-minute driving-time radius from a college’s location.
