Tech majors are booming, but rural students stuck in the digital divide

Colleges are seeing a surge in technology majors, but rural students are lagging behind on opportunities to take advantage of the growing, high-paying fields. 

From 2018 to 2022, “Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services” majors increased 23 percent, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center, from 423,315 to 518,844.

Rural students, however, face two pressing issues: the digital divide of internet reliability and technology access and education opportunities. 

The National Center for Education Statistics said that in 2019, around 76 percent of rural students had fixed broadband internet access at home, lower than those in towns at 79 percent, cities at 80 percent and suburban areas at 87 percent. 

On Wednesday, the White House announced the “Online for All” initiative, which will work with more than 300 national and community organizations “to close the digital divide.” 

“In the 21st century, high-speed internet is not a luxury. It is a necessity. Which is why President Biden and I are in the process of making high-speed internet affordable for everyone,” Vice President Harris said in a recent video.

Part of the campaign will point people to the Affordable Connectivity Program that was passed under the bipartisan infrastructure bill. Currently, more than 18.5 million households are part of the program, which is saving more than $500 million per month on high-speed internet bills for everyday Americans.

“Certainly that broadband connectivity is something that we’ve been thinking about as rural education scholars for a long time, and I think it became more visible to those who are sort of outside of that bubble” during the COVID-19 pandemic, said Amy Azano, professor and director of the Center for Rural Education at Virginia Tech.

However, the more pressing issue for a majority of rural students is they don’t have the technology education available to them that others do. 

While many schools in cities and suburbs have coding classes or robotics programs, Chris Sanders, who grew up in rural Kentucky and is now director of the Rural Technology Fund, can look back on an early education with little access to computer science.

“There’s still lots of rural schools that don’t have computer classes. If they have one, it’s probably typing or Microsoft Office, which kids are probably picking up on their own,” Sanders said. 

The Rural Technology Fund has been around for 15 years and has reached more than 170,000 students in more than 800 schools by sponsoring scholarships and tech education in rural communities. 

“I was very, very interested in computers, and there were really no classes and there were no mentors. There were local businesses that provided the resources I needed to learn what I was interested in, so I kind of had to do that on my own,” Sanders said as to why he started the organization. 

Funding the programs is a major issue for rural schools, but they also need the personnel to back them up.

“We have a pay equity issue in rural places. If we’re paying teachers less in rural places, it makes it more difficult to recruit and retain the teachers who would maybe want to live in a rural community,” Azano said. 

Rural schools already have difficulties finding teachers in common subjects such as reading and math, but K-12 educators who focused on technology in college are even rarer, according to Sanders. 

Allen Pratt, executive director of the National Rural Education Association, said “there’s a gap” in rural schools taking advantage of technology programs and “the ability to be trained or get a micro-credential.”

“We need to do a better job of expanding those opportunities, especially when you can do so many things online now,” Pratt said.

The problem follows students long after high school. 

Rural students are already less likely than the rest of the population to go to college, with only 21.1 percent of the rural population having earned a college degree in 2021, according to o the U.S. Census and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service, compared to 35.7 percent in non-rural areas. 

Once a rural student does go to college, the likelihood of them pursuing or sticking with a technology major is also lower than others. 

Sanders says he knows a lot of rural students who start out in tech majors but “then they drop out or change majors after the first year.”

“And that’s because they’re far outpaced by their classmates from urban and suburban areas who have been nurtured in the field,” he added.

And even as rural students lack the tech education they need, the field is one that can significantly benefit their communities.

Since COVID-19, many jobs, including tech ones, have gone remote, giving those in the field the opportunity to live wherever they want while obtaining high-paying careers. 

“Kids could take that money and go back to their communities in rural areas and spend that there. The spending that happens in rural communities affects everyone so I think there’s a lot of power there. I think kids from rural areas in tech jobs stand to make a lot of people’s lives better,” Sanders said.

But there is hope for rural students to catch up, even as technological advances in areas such as artificial intelligence continue apace.

“Rural people are industrious and resilient and resourceful. And so I’m incredibly optimistic because I think that rural people have had to get things done in all kinds of ways and I think that will continue,” Azano said.