Community 'college deserts' leave students stranded from higher education

(The Hill) - Experts are increasingly sounding the alarm on community "college deserts" that leave students without readily accessible higher education options.  

The deserts, locations where high schools are more than 30 miles away from all community colleges, disproportionately affect rural Americans and those of color, threatening to exacerbate existing education gaps.

“These college deserts, a lot of them, obviously, are more prevalent in rural areas, where you have a lot of space, and people are kind of distributed out. It is a concern because you don't want segments of people left behind,” said Rebecca Corbin, CEO of the National Association for Community College Entrepreneurship, adding many of the affected areas are in the southern United States.  

College deserts have gained more attention in recent years as they are considered a significant reason some groups are not attending college.

A study from October showed such deserts in Texas are a major factor for students who decline to pursue higher learning in the sprawling state, the second-largest in the U.S.

"We do in this country provide transportation to children up through grade 12. And then when it gets to the post-secondary level, students generally are on their own for transportation," Riley Acton, a researcher with Miami University in Ohio, told The Texas Tribune.

While all students are less likely to attend community colleges faced with formidable distance, White and Asian ones who find themselves in deserts are more likely to turn to four-year institutions instead, said Lois Miller, an assistant professor at the University of South Carolina and co-author of the study.

“We find that White, Asian and higher-income students ... when they're less likely to go to a two-year college, instead, they substitute towards four-year colleges and are more likely to earn bachelor's degrees, whereas for Black, Hispanic and lower socioeconomic status students, when they are less likely to go to a two-year college, they actually just forgo college altogether," Miller said. “They're less likely to get associate's and less likely to get a bachelor's degree.” 

She added that, in addition to obstacles of cost, Black and Hispanic students could be more likely to be working part-time jobs or caring for family members, making it harder for them to consider options further afield.

“It's just going to be more costly for you to move further from home or to do a long commute to go to college, and you might imagine that that would kind of vary by race and socioeconomic status,” Miller said.  

In general, community colleges often get students who wouldn't otherwise consider higher education at all, so their absence disproportionately affects those groups.

“I think it's also interesting to note that community colleges serve a lot of first-generation college students. Many of them are single parents. Some of them don't come from college-going culture [...] or don't know how to navigate [the] higher education landscape,” said Martha Parham, senior vice president of public relations at the American Association of Community Colleges.  

But trying to solve the issue of college deserts promptly runs into other problems the higher-education world has been dealing with, including schools shutting down and unreliable broadband in rural areas that can make online classes difficult.

It's easy to simply say "more colleges," but many schools now in operation are having trouble keeping their doors open.

The Hechinger Report found that in the first nine months of this year, 28 degree-granting institutions were shut down, nearly double the 15 that were closed in all of 2023.

“I think community colleges have been wrestling with this for a really, really long time, and so many of them have come up with some creative ways” to serve students in these areas, Parham said. “A lot of them are partnering with state colleges so that they can provide expanded opportunities at the local level.” 

Community colleges are expanding by “going to neighboring towns that are a little further out and offering classes in churches, in community centers and even in other schools, you know, K-12 schools, so that students have an opportunity to take advantage of those classes regardless of maybe their transportation needs," she added.

And offering more online classes to students in these areas is not the easy fix it seems as long as they struggle with internet problems.

“From my organization's perspective, a lot of the work that we've done has been to try to combat this digital divide, because one way of addressing these college deserts is through connectivity,” said Corbin.