Gaps in Broadband Access: Lagging Internet Contributes to Lagging Test Scores, Leaving Rural Students Behind

Poor and No Internet Access Disadvantages Students, Including Lower Grades, Fewer Digital Skills, Lower SAT Scores, and Reduced Interest in Attending University

Rural middle and high school students are more likely to have slow Internet connections or limited access from home and to fall behind in homework, grades, digital skills, and standardized test scores, according to a groundbreaking report from Michigan State University’s Quello Center. The educational setbacks can have significant impacts on college admissions, academic success, and career opportunities.

Developed and carried out in partnership with Merit Network and 15 Michigan school districts, the report “Broadband and Student Performance Gaps” underscores the need for improved infrastructure in rural communities. The report is based on data collected from school districts covering Mecosta County, St. Clair County, and in the eastern region of the Upper Peninsula, spanning from the Tahquamenon area to St. Ignace and Sault Ste. Marie.

“We were surprised with how robust the findings were,” said Quello Center Associate Director for Research Keith Hampton, Ph.D., who is a professor in MSU’s College of Communication Arts and Sciences. “Students without Internet access and those who depend on a cell phone for their only access are half a grade point below those with fast access. This gap has ripple effects that may last an entire life.”

Revealing Impacts on Michigan Students

This study, a first in Michigan and the United States, breaks new ground through the use of multiple data sources, and the scope and impact of its findings. In collaboration with community partners, they worked on a team that included Hampton, Quello Center Assistant Director Laleah Fernandez, Ph.D., Ph.D. student Craig Robertson, as well as Professor and Quello Center Director Johannes M. Bauer, Ph.D.

To conduct the study, the Quello Center researchers collected and analyzed three unique sets of data on student Internet access and academic performance. They surveyed 3,258 students in grades 8-11 through in-class, pen-and-paper surveys in 21 schools across Michigan, looked at student PSAT and SAT scores, and home Internet speed tests. All data were fully de-identified.

The survey which was administered in 173 classrooms included questions that covered everything from students’ online activities, homework completion, subject grades, digital skills, media use, to their goals, experiences and attitudes, and career interests.

Results show that the most rural and socioeconomically disadvantaged students are least likely to have broadband Internet access at home. Only 47 percent of students who live in rural areas have high-speed Internet access, compared to 77 percent of those in suburban areas. Of those who do not have home access, 36 percent live in a home with no computer and 58 percent live on a farm or other rural setting. Students with no high-speed Internet access at home are also less likely to plan to attend a college or university. On the other hand, students with Internet access have substantially higher digital skills, and these skills are a strong predictor of performance on pen-and-paper standardized tests, such as the SAT, PSAT 10 and PSAT 8/9. Read the full report.

“Digital skills are related to proficiency in a range of domains beyond simple technology use, including language and computation. Better home Internet access contributes to diverse technology use and higher digital skills,” said Hampton.

The results show that students who rely on a cell phone only, or have no home Internet access, had a gap in skills that was similar to the gap in digital skill between 8th and 11th grade students.

“We found that students with even modestly lower digital skills perform a lot worse on the SATs,” said Hampton. “We measured digital skills on a scale from 0 to 64. The average score was around a 30, but a student who performs modestly lower in digital skills (13 points or one standard deviation) scores about 7 percentiles lower nationally on the SATs. That is true for standardized test scores across all grades, not just the SAT.”

In the survey, 82% of middle and high school students said that they sometimes or often receive homework that requires Internet access.

The report found that students who rely on a cell phone for Internet access at home, those with no access and those with slower access are less likely to collaborate or seek academic support outside of school from their peers and teachers. It also takes longer for students to complete their homework assignments, and these students are more likely to leave homework incomplete if they do not have home Internet access.

Lagging Internet Affects All Students

There are a variety of reasons as to why students might not be as successful in school.

The report found that the gaps in student performance related to home Internet access exist regardless of differences in socioeconomic status, such as student race and ethnicity, family income or parental education.

“Much of the focus has been on attributing differences in student outcomes to sociodemographic factors, such as household income or parent education levels, and some argue that the same reasons explain why people do not have Internet access,” Bauer said. “The reality is more complicated. In many rural areas, broadband Internet service simply can’t be provided due to the higher cost of delivering services. While poor and remote areas are both less likely to have access, lack of sufficient access alone is a big reason why some children do worse in school than others.”

The report found that the gaps in student performance due to no access, dependence on a cell phone for access, or slow home Internet access exist regardless of differences in socioeconomic status, such as student race and ethnicity, family income, or parental education. Researchers worked with schools in areas where connectivity was often absent due to geography.

“The study is unique, in that we have students who come from both high and low income families who are without Internet access, not because they can’t afford it or because their parents’ don’t see value in it, but because it’s just not available to them,” said Hampton. By working with schools in areas where connectivity was often absent due to geography, researchers built these considerations into the study. “It turns out that deficiencies in student outcomes are tied to both Internet access and socioeconomic issues.”

In addition, students who could only get Internet access at home on their cell phone struggled to utilize the resources available on the Internet, whether due to slow connectivity or caps on data use from local service providers.

“It is wrong to assume that since most have a smartphone, students have sufficient access,” said Bauer. “It turns out that this is not the case. Those who have only cell phone access perform as poorly as those who have no Internet access at all.”

A Gap with Lifelong Impacts

The impact of the Internet access gap has implications that go beyond lower grades and standardized test scores. These scores are part of the formula colleges use to grant admission to prospective students, and they may affect a student’s college and career path.

“In small town and rural America, one of the challenges is to keep up with the digitization of the economy,” said Hampton. He said students don’t learn all the necessary digital skills in the traditional classroom. “That kind of knowledge is important.”

Digital skills serve a key role in many sectors of the economy, whether that means using digital devices, accessing communication applications, building an online presence, or using e-commerce to sell and ship products to distant customers.

“Those who have better broadband access at home also have higher digital skills overall,” said Hampton. “Those digital skills then position individuals better for lifelong careers. They are better positioned for post-secondary education and are more intent on entering STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) careers, which often pay higher salaries.”

In rural areas, gaps in broadband access could lead to economic impacts on entire communities.

“We know that there is a serious gap between what official government statistics tell us about availability of rural broadband and what the actual experience is on the ground,” said Bauer. “Those statistics guide programs to expand networks. There are ripple effects and there are repercussions that are further disadvantaging those who have poor access.”

“The lower interest in post-secondary education or STEM careers decreases lifelong income opportunities and the ability to find jobs in occupations where future demand is high,” said Bauer. “Compared to communities with fast Internet access, those with poor broadband connectivity will experience fewer benefits from the digital transformation.”

For more information, visit: quello.msu.edu/broadbandgap

By Melissa Priebe

> Read the Quello Center Report

Primary takeaways

Digital inequality shows larger impacts on youth academic performance as compared to time spent on screens.
Digital skills play a significant role in mediating unstructured online engagement (social media use, playing video games, browsing the web) and youth academic, social, and psychosocial development.
Unstructured online engagement and face-to-face social interaction are complementary and continuously interact to create and enhance youth capital outcomes.

A familiar story: concerns of screen time

Today’s discussions of adolescent well-being have coalesced around a clear narrative: teenagers spend too much time online, and their academic performance, mental health, and social lives are deteriorating as a result. A steady stream of academic papers, books, and op-eds, alongside a growing number of policy proposals––school phone bans, age-gated social media use, restrictive screen-time limits––rest on the same underlying claim, aligning with a contemporary, digitized version of the displacement hypothesis:

Screen time, particularly the unstructured, free-time spent on social media, gaming, watching video content, or browsing the web, is said to displace the productive face-to-face activities that build adolescents into capable adults.

The implied and often practiced solution is restriction. In response, this dissertation tested this claim directly, and placed it within the broader context of adolescence.

Across three years, I followed 653 Michigan adolescents from early through late adolescence: in grades 8 or 9 (survey one, 2019) to grades 11 or 12 (survey two, 2022). Notably, these students, studied over time, were part of a broader pooled sample of 5,825 students across the same eighteen highschools. The study window captured the year before and the year after the peak of the COVID-19 pandemic and related lockdown orders, functioning as an unprecedented stress test for theories of adolescent social, academic, and digital life and, importantly, as a benchmark to compare the effects of pandemic-related change and inequality to those effects from screen time alone.

Across four studies of adolescents, consisting of six cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses, findings are not consistent with the displacement narrative, nor the broader concerns about the time youth spend on screens.

Findings are, however, consistent with something the current public and (most) academic discussions have largely overlooked or ignored: the gaps and inequalities that determine whether adolescents can access and use the internet meaningfully in the first place.

What the displacement hypothesis overlooks

Displacement and related research and policy concerning the time young people spend online assumes a “zero-sum” model of adolescent day-to-day time. An hour online is an hour not spent studying, reading, sleeping, or interacting face-to-face (i.e., time spent on more productive or developmentally “better” activity).

Indeed, this makes sense logically. However, as an empirical claim, this model requires time spent online to behave differently from all other ways adolescents allocate time; it must produce uniquely negative outcomes and be inherently harmful across digital contexts, rather than the typical mix of trade-offs corresponding to, and often overlooked among any other social or developmental context.

Yet, online time does not differ from other youth activity. Instead, I find it has a mix of pros, cons, and even some “uniquely digital” benefits which youth utilize for social and academic gains. When I compared unstructured digital media use against traditional face-to-face interaction and activities, both produced similar patterns: some negative associations with academic outcomes, some null, and some positive.

Trade-offs within traditional face-to-face activity (for example, social time with friends and family, or time spent in after-school extracurriculars) are treated as ordinary developmental experiences that must be experienced for the betterment of development. The identical trade-offs involving digital time tend to be overlooked or ignored, and online engagement is perceived as altogether harmful.

A growing body of evidence, including this dissertation, do not support that distinction. Indeed, the developmental context is routinely misread, leaving out the context of the experiences and time spent on digital, as well as face-to-face activities, interactions, existing inequalities, and changes inherent to development. As such, I proposed a novel framework to understand these contexts:

Digital capital exchange

Rather than treating screen time as a unified harm, this dissertation advances an “exchange”-based framework, grounded in James Coleman’s theories of youth capital and digital inequality scholarship, particularly following Eszter Hargittai, Jan van Dijk, and Alexander van Deursen (see this list of all dissertation references for full works).

The core proposition is that adolescents’ online engagement is not an alternative to developmental activity but another, albiet modern domain through which young people accumulate and mobilize online resources––particularly digital skills––that work alongside existing social networks and experiences to be exchanged for human capital (measured as: academic achievement, aspirations, STEM interest) and social capital (peer networks, community participation, extracurricular involvement).

Online time is not the mechanism; instead, it is digital skills that I find to be the most vital component in youth capital exchange and enhancement. Unstructured online engagement contributes to online skills; those skills, accumulated and mobilized alongside existing peer, family, and community networks, translate into the outcomes researchers and parents care about, i.e., academic achievement, aspirations, and face-to-face interaction and social networks.

This digital capital framework treats online and in-person contexts as complementary rather than antagonistic, and it situates adolescents’ digital lives within the structural conditions––connectivity quality, device reliability, autonomy of use––that determine whether exchange can occur at all.

Methods (in brief)

Paper-and-pencil surveys were administered to students in classrooms at two time-points: spring 2019 (N=2,876) and spring 2022 (N=2,949), across the same eighteen predominantly rural Michigan schools, grades 8–12. Official, nationally-ranked standardized reading, writing, and math test scores (PSAT 8/9, PSAT 10, SAT; College Board) were then anonymously linked to students’ survey responses with the help of participating districts.

Cross-sectional path analyses modeled pooled and wave-specific samples (pooled N=5,825); two-wave cross-lagged panel models tested reciprocal, longitudinal relationships on the 653 students who completed both surveys. Multi-group analyses of the cross-lagged panel models compared relationships between girls (N=345) and boys (N=308). All longitudinal models included time-invariant socioeconomic covariates as well as time-varying covariates to reduce omitted-variable bias.

Key findings: an overview

To summarize, to the best of my ability, eight chapters across 376 pages, I present two primary findings:

First: digital inequality predicted larger and more consistent declines in human capital than screen time did.

Unreliable home internet and technology maintenance problems––experiencing and/or dealing with broken or outdated devices and software, restrictive school-issued hardware, issues with connecting to or maintaining internet access––decreased youth GPA and standardized test achievement. And, these effect sizes were substantially larger than any negative direct effect from unstructured digital media use.

Across all four empirical studies, digital inequality emerged as the most substantial predictor of academic and developmental decline.

Second: digital skills mediated the relationship between online time and adolescent academic and social outcomes.

Unstructured digital media use, particularly online gaming and web browsing, predicted higher internet and social media skills for adolescents, which in turn predicted stronger academic achievement and self-efficacy (human capital), and social interaction and extracurricular participation (social capital). The positive indirect effect of screen time through skills offset or exceeded any small negative direct effects across several outcomes (supporting our existing peer-reviewed work: Hales & Hampton, 2025, and which you can read more about here).

These exchange processes were amplified when peer and family networks were modeled alongside digital skills, consistent with the premise that online and offline contexts operate together rather than in competition. The effect was not universal: social media skills amplified rather than offset a negative association with consistency of interest, one of the two subscales of grit. The exchange framework describes a contextual and conditional, domain-specific mechanism, not a blanket defense of time spent online.

Implications

If digital inequality, and not screen time, is the primary predictor of adolescent academic and developmental decline, and still warrants concern regarding access quality and experience even with the broader adoption of digital devices across the United States, the current policy emphasis on restriction is pointed at the wrong target. The evidence supports a different set of priorities.

Stable, reliable home (fast) broadband should be treated as an educational prerequisite rather than a consumer amenity. Unreliable connectivity exerted larger downward pressure on human capital than any measure of screen time, and that pressure intensified during the pandemic-era reliance on digital infrastructure. Technology maintenance, device repair, replacement, technical support, and the flexibility to install software and explore the web autonomously, matters as much as initial access, and school-issued devices that restrict autonomous use appear to hinder skill accumulation rather than support it.

Restrictive parental mediation of internet use was negatively associated with grit and self-efficacy at magnitudes comparable to the positive contributions of face-to-face activity. This challenges the assumption that digital restriction functions protectively. Instructive mediation, teaching adolescents to verify information, navigate platforms critically, and mobilize online resources toward meaningful ends, is the posture the data supports.

Finally, the technical skill-building that occurs through gaming, self-directed exploration, and deep web use is skill-building, not wasted time. Closing the persistent gender gap in these domains likely requires legitimizing technical play for girls, rather than restricting it for everyone.

None of the above is an argument that screen time is benign. It is an argument that screen time is the wrong focus, particularly when studied mostly in isolation. Context matters substantially, whether that is time spent on other activities during adolescence, the period of adolescence itself, digital inequality, resources gained from such online use, and how all such factors interact. The factor that predicts whether a given adolescent can convert online engagement into capital outcomes is structural: access, infrastructure, skills, and the autonomy to use them. These factors are distributed unevenly, and its uneven distribution, not hours logged, is what separates adolescents who thrive from those who fall behind.

The full dissertation is available through Michigan State University’s ProQuest archive, or see the embedded full-text PDF below. I’m happy to share papers, preprints, or the underlying framework with anyone interested and working in this area––don’t hesitate to reach out via my contact form. Thanks for reading.

Tags: Broadband Gap Michigan rural

Gaps in Broadband Access: Lagging Internet Contributes to Lagging Test Scores, Leaving Rural Students Behind