Hazel Levy

Increasing numbers of students require internet access to pursue their undergraduate degrees, yet broadband access remains inequitable across student populations. Furthermore, surveys that currently show differences in access by student demographics or location typically do so at high levels of aggregation, thereby obscuring important variation between subpopulations within larger groups. Through the dual lenses of quantitative intersectionality and critical race spatial analysis, we use Bayesian multilevel regression and census microdata to model variation in broadband access among undergraduate populations at deeper interactions of identity. We find substantive heterogeneity in student broadband access by gender, race, and place, including between typically aggregated subpopulations. Our findings speak to inequities in students’ geographies of opportunity and suggest a range of policy prescriptions at both the institutional and federal level.

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Despite its increasing importance for educational practices, broadband is not equally accessible among all students. In addition to oft-noted last-mile barriers faced by rural students, there can be wide variation in in-home access between proximate urban and suburban neighborhoods ostensibly covered by the same telecommunications infrastructure. In this paper, we investigate the connection between these disparities and earlier redlining practices by spatially joining two current measures of broadband access with Depression-era residential security maps that graded neighborhoods for real estate investment risk from “Best” to “Hazardous” based in part on racist and classist beliefs. We find evidence that despite internet service providers reporting similar technological availability across neighborhoods, access to broadband in the home generally decreases in tandem with historic neighborhood risk classification. We further find differences in in-home broadband access by race/ethnicity and income level, both across and within neighborhood grades. Our results demonstrate how federally developed housing policies from the prior century remain relevant to the current digital divide and should be considered in discussions of educational policies that require broadband access for success.

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