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Community Colleges Tackle The Digital Divide
As community colleges cobble together funding for new technologies, some are finding that wires on campus are not enough to bridge the digital divide for rural students who still face barriers to getting online.
"The have nots seem to be the group who have been constantly left out," said Lynn Cundiff, president of Salt Lake Community College in Utah. "They are the last to get everything."
Community colleges, which are in a position to serve rural areas, are working to get wired, college leaders say. But once wired, they often cannot reach rural students who have no Internet access. In many cases, the infrastructure isn't there or it is simply not affordable for those students living in outlying areas.
The lack of access is a problem for communities struggling to participate in the new economy. If technology, educational opportunities and jobs aren't available, young people will leave, which could reduce the viability of smaller towns, Cundiff said.
According to a recent Commerce Department report analyzing the digital divide, 38.9 percent of rural households reported being online as of August 2000, compared to 42.3 percent of urban households. In 1998, only 22.2 percent of rural households were connected to the Internet. Nearly one-quarter of all Americans live in rural areas, which are defined as areas with less than 2,500 people.
Getting Wired
Virtually every community college has Internet access for its students and at higher speeds than dial-up telephone connections, said Larry Johnson, president of Fox Valley Technical College in Appleton, WI. Even the tribal colleges are about 80 percent wired, Johnson estimated.
But wiring a campus can be an expensive endeavor. While high-speed connections are not a huge expense, acquiring computer equipment and keeping it current is costly, Johnson said. Fox Valley replaces its computers every three years and has a $3 million yearly budget for technology upgrades.
"We milk everything we can out of them, but at the end of their life we move them out the door," he said.
To get wired, colleges have turned to a variety of funding sources and forged public and private partnerships.
Making Connections
Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, IA, has received assistance from the Iowa Communications Network, which funded a statewide fiber optics network. The college has to pay for the connection, but the state subsidizes the costs, said Norm Nielsen, president of the college.
"We would be out there battling like everybody else if the state hadn't figured out how to cover the costs so everyone would be able to utilize the fiber optic network," he said.
This level of Internet connection has allowed Kirkwood to build remote hubs in communities throughout the state that allow students to take classes they otherwise could not.
Newer schools have made technology a priority at the beginning.
"We realized at the get-go this issue of access to information was critical," said Ken Martin, president of Ouachita Technical College Malvern, AR. When the school was founded in 1991, it started with 12 donated computers. It now has 400 networked computers.
Because higher education funding is scarce, the leaders at Ouachita realized they had to prioritize and make a commitment to dedicating as much money as possible "toward the IT side of the house," Martin said. The school also benefited when the local phone company installed a fiber optic trunk in the middle of the campus as it built out its high-speed Internet services.
Others had to work harder to convince officials of the importance of new technology. Cheryl Cox, director of teaching and learning at Midlands Technical College in Columbia, SC, said her college had to bridge a digital divide within the school by developing a consensus backed by a cohesive technology plan.
"Once you have a plan, you can look for the resources," Cox said.
Midlands Technical College received resources through a federal technology fund and from a Working Connections grant from Microsoft and administered through the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). Now the faculty is trained to use the technology and the school is wired.
The Microsoft grant also helps colleges attract other funding sources.
"Every college has used the grant to leverage partnerships from other places that wouldn't have looked at them twice," said Lynn Barnett, AACC's director of academic, student and community development.
The Working Connections grant has reached 28 colleges through a five-year, $7 million commitment from Microsoft. The company also has donated $40 million worth of software, Barnett said.
Cox noted that the grants were invaluable in executing the plan, but "the biggest single obstacle is getting the budgeting piece institutionalized and not relying on grants and surpluses."
No Place to Go
Even when colleges install new technology, if their students lack Internet connections at home they cannot take full advantage of the institution's offerings.
For example, Floyd College near Atlanta installed state-of-the-art technology and provided every student with a laptop computer, but students couldn't take advantage of the network if they lived outside of the metropolitan area, Cundiff, the former president of Floyd College said.
Because high-speed Internet services have not been deployed 40 miles outside of Atlanta, downloading data from the school library or signing up for distance learning courses was impossible or prohibitively slow, Cundiff said.
Another issue for students is the expense of dial-up Internet connections. For many communities, connecting to the Internet requires a long distance phone call, and many students cannot afford the long distance bill they would ring up to connect to the college's network.
Some Alabama students face that problem, said Bill Brown, dean and chief instructional officer at George Wallace State Community College Hanceville. America Online is not available through a local dial-up phone number in many communities, which leaves local Internet service providers to fill in the gaps. But Brown said the connections are often not reliable and non-existent in some areas.
New Mexico faces a similar problem that makes even using e-mail prohibitively expensive. And in extremely rural areas, such as the Appalachian region in Kentucky, 20 percent of the population does not have a phone, said Barnett.
The educators agreed that congressional funding and incentives encouraging telecommunications companies to deploy high-speed services to rural communities are needed to bridge the divide, but many of the problems would still require local solutions.
 | - by Teri Rucker |
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