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. A pressing issue for a majority of rural students is they don’t have the technology education available to them that others do. Also, 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 US Census and the US Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Economic Research Service, compared to 35.7 percent in non-rural areas. Further, once a rural student does go to college, the likelihood of them pursuing or sticking with a technology major is also lower than others.