A recent report by the Urban Institute (Rosenboom and Blagg, 2018) indicated the important depressive effect of distance from higher education and access to internet on enrollment in and completion of college degrees. These factors create what the authors identify as “education deserts,” whose effects are especially pronounced among Native Americans and rural residents in the western US. Additional research on rural communities in the west (Hightree et al. 2018) points to the lack of access to education and employment as significant factors in rural residents’ level of satisfaction with their community. These studies suggest the need to look more closely at the actual distances and types of higher education that rural communities in the west can access. Additionally, more detailed analyses are needed concerning how access to higher education may be related to rural residents’ perceptions of their communities.
The literature on rural education (Schafft and Biddle 2014; Howley and Howley 2010; Tieken 2014) indicates a number of factors that tend to depress or alter the postsecondary aspirations rural youth. These include local place attachment, family background, limited proximity to higher educational institutions, and the perceived limited use-value of postsecondary degrees in rural areas. In fact, while rural youth often are ambivalent about schooling in general and smaller percentages attain college degrees than their counterparts in urban and suburban areas, rural educators and community members also recognize the ways in which successful schooling may result in siphoning off the best and brightest for life beyond the rural home community (Schafft and Biddle 2014). Conversely, for rural residents with higher education interests, the lack of financial resources often limits such pursuits. While only a few studies examine the educational needs of rural communities in the west, the effects on community satisfaction of distance to higher education institutions and access to the internet have yet to be examined.
For this paper, we will address these questions using data collected from residents in twenty-five rural communities (i.e., those with populations of 2500 to 5000) in the Rural Utah Community Study (RUCS) in 2017. Data from the RUCS can be used to identify which respondents are in a higher education desert by geo-referencing their location to measure the distance between the respondents and higher education institutions. Questions addressing opinions about education, internet access/usage, community attachment/satisfaction, and demographic characteristics of respondents in the RUCS can then be used to thoroughly examine the relationship between community satisfaction, geographic distance to higher education institutions, and internet access.
