Inequalities on the Digital Campus

Abstract

Inequalities on the Digital Campus Alice Quach (bio) and Victor Tan Chen (bio) When the pandemic struck last year and classes went virtual, students scrambled to adjust. A twenty-two-year-old Filipina-American psychology major at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) from a working-class background told us about the difficulties she faced attending her classes and getting her homework done. Her apartment’s unstable internet connection often booted her out of class, and she was stymied by the fact that she didn’t even have a desk at home. Because desks were sold out at many stores at the start of the pandemic, she built a wobbly makeshift one out of shelves she bought at a hardware store. A year later, the challenges have continued because of the condition of the small apartment she shares with a roommate. Her bedroom ceiling leaks whenever it rains. Her bed was ruined after a storm, and her landlord has yet to fix the problem (the bucket she used to catch the ceiling drips was visible during our Zoom interview). Along with the “paper-thin” walls of her apartment, these various at-home distractions have made it hard to concentrate on academics, she said. While universities are reopening for business, the rapid spread of the Delta variant of COVID-19 raises concerns about more lockdowns. Now is a good time, then, to consider the impact that the shift to virtual learning has had on the millions of college and graduate students forced to study—either partly or wholly—at home. Through research conducted at VCU in Richmond, we found that class and race shaped the realities of online learning in 2020 and 2021 in deep, sometimes unexpected ways that largely revolved around the family resources available to students. Affluent and white students drew upon financial and material sources of support from their parents, partners, and employers to help mitigate the hurdles to learning posed by the pandemic. Our interviews with less-advantaged students, by contrast, made clear just how much they typically rely on the physical infrastructure of the university: quiet places to study, fast and reliable internet connections, comfortable desks. In other words, the pandemic highlighted not only the wildly unequal resources available [End Page 57] to students learning at home, but also just how much university campuses matter in reining in those inequalities—creating, through their shared spaces, a more level playing field for students of all backgrounds. To understand how students were adjusting to socially distanced learning, Alice interviewed thirty undergraduate and graduate students at VCU. A state university, VCU enrolled 22,277 undergraduates and 5,554 graduate students in 2020–2021. About half of its undergraduates are people of color, and a third receive federal Pell Grant support—making it an ideal campus for observing how working-class students coped with the impact of the pandemic. When lockdowns began last year, VCU shut down its campus, but it stayed open the following school year through a mix of virtual and in-person classes, with about half of classes wholly or partially online in the fall of 2020. Even before the pandemic, there was heated debate over whether the growing popularity of online learning would heighten or lessen higher education’s age-old inequalities. Advocates argued that virtual instruction would make it easier for some students—particularly working learners—to take classes. Critics worried about the so-called digital divide: high-speed internet access is costly (and, in some rural areas, nonexistent), meaning that students from more privileged families are better able to participate online and take advantage of the latest learning technologies. Click for larger view View full resolution College students in March 2020 protesting a mandatory order to evacuate campus dorms (Photo by Maddie Meyer/Getty Images) Alice’s in-depth interviews with students illustrated just how much economic insecurity—and the absence of a familial financial backstop—makes [End Page 58] it difficult to study virtually. One student Alice talked to was a twenty-nine-year-old Latina senior—a first-generation college student from a working-class background. Even before the pandemic, her need to pay her way through school meant she worked two part-time...