In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at the impact of college ‘deserts’ — sometimes defined as an area where people live more than a 30-minute drive to a campus — and found that those residing close to a college are more likely to attend. But a new study shows that these higher education deserts affect some groups of students much differently than others.
The study, which looked at a rich set of high school and college data in Texas, found that Black and Hispanic students and those in low-income families who lived more than 30 miles from a public two-year college were significantly less likely to attend college. But white and Asian students in those same communities were slightly more likely than other students in the state to complete four-year degrees, meaning that the lack of a nearby two-year option seemed to increase the likelihood of moving away to attend college.
“While all students who live in a community college desert are less likely to complete an associate’s degree, their alternative enrollment and degree completion outcomes vary sharply by race-ethnicity and [socioeconomic status],” the study finds. In other words, for low-income and underrepresented minority groups, living near a community college can be a crucial way to gain access to any higher education. Meanwhile, such proximity might lead students in other groups to attend two-year college rather than pursue a four-year degree.
The results are particularly important at a time when more colleges are struggling to remain open, says Riley Acton, an assistant professor of economics at Miami University in Ohio and one of the researchers who worked on the new study.
“If a public institution in particular, let’s say a public community college, is thinking about closing, or is thinking about merging, or is thinking about opening a new campus or consolidating campuses,” she says, “they should be mindful about who the students are that live near those different campuses.”
The researchers also suggest that colleges should consider providing transportation options or credits to students living in college deserts. “If you don’t have a car in rural Texas, that’s going to be a very hard barrier to overcome” without some sort of help, Acton notes.
Novel Finding
Meanwhile, Black and Hispanic students are more likely than those in other groups to live in a college desert, according to research by Nicholas Hillman, a professor of educational policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who was one of the first researchers to draw attention to the effects of college location on educational attainment, back in 2016.
In an interview with EdSurge, Hillman says that the implications of Acton’s new study are “really interesting,” adding that it is probably the largest quantitative study to take on the question of how college deserts affect different groups differently.
“It makes clear that, ‘Wait a minute, distance is different for different groups of students,’” Hillman says.
One takeaway for Hillman is the importance of making the transfer process from two-year colleges to four-year institutions more frictionless, so that students who live near two-year colleges who are more likely to start there have ample opportunity to go on to get a four-year degree.
Hillman says that he began looking at geography out of frustration with an emphasis during the Obama administration on providing consumer information about higher education as a solution to college access. For instance, one major initiative started during that time was the College Scorecard, which provides information on college options based on various government datasets.
“The dominant narrative was, ‘If students just have better info about where to go to college, more would go,’” he says. “I said, ‘This is bananas. This is not how it works.’”
He grew up in northern Indiana, where the nearest college is 40 miles away. For people he knew there, information about college was not what was keeping them from enrolling. “If you don’t have a job, you’re not going to be spending all this money on gas to go to college,” he says.
