The Internet and Education - Colleges And Universities

No group was more wired in 2002 than college students. According to Jones in The Internet Goes to College, nearly 86% of the 14.5 million college students in 2002 had been online. (See Table 6.13.) Surprisingly, many students first started using the Web regularly only in college. Roughly half (49%) of online college students first became Internet users in college, while the other half (47%) had used the Internet before college. All college students had used a computer by the time they were nineteen, and 20% had used a computer before the age of nine.

As to time spent on the Internet per week, 75% of online college students were online four or more hours a

TABLE 6.5

Ratio of public school students to instructional computers with Internet access, by school characteristics, 1998–2002
	Ratio of students to instructional computers with Internet access
School characteristic	1998	1999	2000	2001	2002
1Data for combined schools are included in the totals and in analyses by other school characteristics but are not shown separately.
2Percent minority enrollment was not available for some schools. Over the years, the missing information ranged from 0 schools (1999) to 31 schools (2001). In 2002, this information was missing for 15 schools.
3Percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch was not available for some schools. Over the years, the missing information ranged from 0 schools (2002) to 10 schools (1999).
Note: Ratios are based on all public schools. All of the estimates in this report were recalculated from raw data files using the same computational algorithms. Consequently, some estimates presented here may differ trivially (i.e., 1 percent) from results published prior to 2001.
SOURCE: Anne Kleiner, Laurie Lewis, and Bernard Greene, "Table 7. Ratio of Public School Students to Instructional Computers with Internet Access, by School Characteristics: 1998–2002," in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, October 2003, http://www.nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/2004011/tables.asp (accessed November 22, 2004)
All public schools	12.1	9.1	6.6	5.4	4.8
Instructional level1
Elementary	13.6	10.6	7.8	6.1	5.2
Secondary	9.9	7.0	5.2	4.3	4.1
School size
Less than 300	9.1	5.7	3.9	4.1	3.1
300 to 999	12.3	9.4	7.0	5.6	5.0
1,000 or more	13.0	10.0	7.2	5.4	5.1
Locale
City	14.1	11.4	8.2	5.9	5.5
Urban fringe	12.4	9.1	6.6	5.7	4.9
Town	12.2	8.2	6.2	5.0	4.4
Rural	8.6	6.6	5.0	4.6	4.0
Percent minority enrollment2
Less than 6 percent	10.1	7.0	5.7	4.7	4.0
6 to 20 percent	10.4	7.8	5.9	4.9	4.6
21 to 49 percent	12.1	9.5	7.2	5.5	5.2
50 percent or more	17.2	13.3	8.1	6.4	5.1
Percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch3
Less than 35 percent	10.6	7.6	6.0	4.9	4.6
35 to 49 percent	10.9	9.0	6.3	5.2	4.5
50 to 74 percent	15.8	10.0	7.2	5.6	4.7
75 percent or more	16.8	16.8	9.1	6.8	5.5

week. Nineteen percent were hardcore users, devoting twelve hours or more to the Internet. Although 85% of college students owned a computer, 33% reported that they used a campus computer more often than their own. In terms of demographics, Table 6.13 reveals that slightly more men (87%) were online in 2002 than women (85%). Some 90% of white college students were online, versus 82% of Hispanic students, and 74% of African-American students.

As can be seen in Table 6.14, the most popular Internet activity among college students was communicating socially, which was also the most popular activity for teenagers. Forty-two percent of college students used the Internet to e-mail and instant message friends more often than they used it for any other activity. Engaging in work for classes came in a close second at 38%. Only 10% of college students used the Internet for entertainment more than they used it for any other purpose. Based on statistics from the marketing research firm comScore Media Metrix, Table 6.15 displays a list of twenty Web sites in 2002 where a disproportionate amount of hits came from college students. The list generally reflects the activities noted in Table 6.14. The number one Web site on the list is Live-Journal (www.livejournal.com). Combining entertainment with communication, this Web site allows people to create an online journal (blog) for others to read. While most of the other Web sites are related to gaming and music, a few are linked to academic and cultural endeavors. FastWeb (fastweb.monster.com) is a search engine for those looking for scholarships, and DueNow.com (www.duenow.com) is a homework resource center for students.

College Students and Communication

In The Internet Goes to College Jones concluded that the most popular Internet activity for students was social communication with others. Some 85% of college students believed the Internet to be a convenient way to interact with others. Table 6.16 lists the people college students communicated with the most via the Internet. Friends topped the chart (72%), followed by family (10%), and professors (7%). Only a small fraction (6%) of college students communicated most with their romantic partners, and fewer still (5%) primarily communicated with work colleagues. Sixty-nine percent of undergraduates replied, however, that they still liked to use the phone more than the Internet to talk to people. Many students simply saw the Internet as a way to touch base with people or set up a time to talk on the phone or in person at a later date. Fully 19% of college students said they had dealt with someone first online before meeting them in person. Forwarding jokes and other messages to friends and family was the most popular online social activity among wired college students.

E-mail was by far the favorite online communications tool used by online undergraduates in 2002. (See Table 6.17.) Twice as many students preferred e-mail over instant messaging as their primary method of keeping in touch with others online. Online college students, however, used instant messaging far more than the general population of Internet users. (Only half of all adult Internet users in 2002 used instant messaging, as opposed to three-quarters of undergraduates.) The third favorite communications tool employed by college students was Web boards, followed by chat rooms, and finally newsgroups. As to the time spent communicating, 25% of all college students reported that they interact socially online three or more hours a week.

College Students and Academics

Though the two are not mutually exclusive, the Inter-net appeared to occupy as much time as homework for

TABLE 6.6

Public schools using procedures to prevent student access to inappropriate material on the Internet, 2001–02
	Monitoring by teachers or other staff		Blocking/filtering software		Written contract that parents have to sign		Written contract that students have to sign		Monitoring software		Honor code for students		Intranet
School characteristic	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002
1Data for combined schools are included in the totals and in analyses by other school characteristics but are not shown separately.
2Percent minority enrollment was not available for 31 schools in 2001. In 2002, this information was missing for 15 schools. The weighted response rate was 98.6 percent.
3Percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch was not available for 2 schools in 2001.
Note: Percentages are based on 95 percent of public schools (99 percent with Internet access times 96 percent using technologies/procedures to prevent student access to inappropriate material on the Internet) in 2001, and 98 percent of public schools (99 percent with Internet access times 99 percent using technologies/procedures to prevent student access to inappropriate material on the Internet) in 2002.
SOURCE: Anne Kleiner, Laurie Lewis, and Bernard Greene, "Table 18. Percent of Public Schools with Internet Access Using Various Technologies or Procedures to Prevent Student Access to Inappropriate Material on the Internet, by School Characteristic: 2001–02,"in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, October 2003, http://www.nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/2004011/tables.asp (accessed November 22, 2004)
All public schools	91	91	87	96	80	82	75	77	46	52	44	41	26	32
Instructional level1
Elementary	90	91	85	95	78	82	72	74	43	51	44	41	24	34
Secondary	93	92	93	98	87	82	87	84	52	57	45	43	33	28
School size
Less than 300	88	90	81	97	73	82	69	78	42	51	38	40	17	19
300 to 999	92	91	88	95	82	82	76	75	47	52	46	42	29	37
1,000 or more	93	95	93	99	86	81	84	81	48	59	46	43	32	33
Locale
City	90	88	83	91	78	78	72	74	49	45	51	38	29	38
Urban fringe	91	92	88	96	80	79	76	69	44	53	43	44	29	37
Town	84	93	87	99	79	84	76	85	37	65	39	40	19	24
Rural	95	91	87	98	82	87	78	83	49	51	42	42	24	26
Percent minority enrollment2
Less than 6 percent	92	92	86	96	82	83	77	81	47	51	41	39	21	20
6 to 20 percent	93	92	86	96	80	82	75	73	44	57	45	41	30	37
21 to 49 percent	91	94	86	96	79	83	77	77	46	53	46	50	29	41
50 percent or more	88	87	87	95	78	80	72	75	45	48	44	39	27	35
Percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch3
Less than 35 percent	92	95	87	95	82	82	77	75	45	54	48	44	29	34
35 to 49 percent	94	89	86	98	83	86	78	80	40	47	38	42	23	28
50 to 74 percent	90	90	86	97	81	83	79	81	51	53	40	40	22	30
75 percent or more	87	86	86	95	73	76	64	71	46	52	45	37	28	35

most students, according to Jones in The Internet Goes to College. Only 14% of students said they studied twelve hours or more a week. Two thirds (62%) claimed they studied for less than seven hours per week. Despite the potential distraction posed by the Internet, 79% of college students believed the Internet impacted their academic experience favorably.

E-mail has greatly affected the relationship between student and professor. About 47% of all college student said their professor required them to use e-mail as part of a class. Professors tended to use e-mail the most to notify the entire class of changes to homework assignments or to make general announcements such as class cancellations. Eighty-two percent of undergraduates reported receiving assignment information via e-mail during their college career. This student-professor relationship, however, was generally a one-way affair. Half (51%) of online college students rarely e-mailed their professors, and only roughly one-tenth (11%) contacted their professor once or more a week via e-mail. The rest were somewhere in between. In terms of what students e-mailed professors about, three quarters (75%) of college students said they had used e-mail to contact a professor sometime in their college career to ask about an assignment. Almost two-thirds (62%) of students had used email to arrange a time to meet, and roughly the same amount (58%) had e-mailed a professor to discuss grades. E-mails also allowed students to express their views and opinions to professors. The Pew/Internet study on college life reported that in 2002 nearly 46% of online college students agreed that e-mail was useful in articulating ideas that they did not feel comfortable verbalizing in class. A quarter (25%) of online students used e-mail to tell professors they were unable to finish an assignment, and two-thirds (65%) notified their professors of absences via e-mail. Overall, half of online students believed in 2002 that e-mail improved their inter-action with their professor.

The Internet also gave students who lived on and off campus the ability to collaborate with one another on coursework without having to leave their rooms. Sixty-nine

TABLE 6.7

Children's access to home computer and use of the Internet at home, 2000
[As of August. For children 3 to 17 years old. (60,635 represents 60,635,000). Based on the Current Population Survey and subject to sampling error.]
	Home computer access			Use of the Internet at home
Characteristic	Children (1,000)	Number (1,000)	Percent	Number (1,000)	Percent
*Persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race.
SOURCE: "No. 260. Children's Access to Home Computer and Use of the Internet at Home: 2000," in Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2003, U.S. Census Bureau, Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Department of Commerce, 2003, http://www.census.gov/prod/2004pubs/03statab/educ.pdf (accessed November 22, 2004)
Total	60,635	39,430	65.0	18,437	30.4
Age:
3 to 5 years	11,915	6,905	58.0	864	7.3
6 to 11 years	24,837	15,924	64.1	6,135	24.7
12 to 17 years	23,884	16,600	69.5	11,439	47.9
Sex:
Male	31,055	20,273	65.3	9,392	30.2
Female	29,580	19,156	64.8	9,045	30.6
Race and Hispanic origin:
White	47,433	33,062	69.7	15,940	33.6
White non-Hispanic	38,438	29,731	77.3	14,773	38.4
Black	9,779	4,161	42.5	1,441	14.7
Asian and Pacific Islander	2,581	1,855	71.9	909	35.2
Hispanic*	9,568	3,546	37.1	1,229	12.8
Householder's educational attainment:
Less than high school diploma	10,159	3,060	30.1	1,126	11.1
High school diploma/GED	18,915	10,559	55.8	4,600	24.3
Some college	16,994	12,712	74.8	5,926	34.9
Bachelor's degree or more	14,567	13,098	89.9	6,786	46.6
Household type:
Family households	60,012	39,119	65.2	18,284	30.5
Married-couple household	42,936	31,593	73.6	15,050	35.1
Male householder	3,092	1,508	48.8	740	23.9
Female householder	13,984	6,017	43.0	2,493	17.8
Nonfamily household	620	310	50.0	154	24.8
Family income:
Total children in families	59,288	38,729	65.3	18,139	30.6
Under $15,000	7,480	2,041	27.3	578	7.7
15,000 to 19,999	2,896	1,044	36.0	373	12.9
20,000 to 24,999	3,596	1,507	41.9	547	15.2
25,000 to 34,999	6,967	3,755	53.9	1,463	21.0
35,000 to 49,999	8,463	6,044	71.4	2,694	31.8
50,000 to 74,999	10,374	8,574	82.6	4,142	39.9
75,000 and over	12,115	11,294	93.2	6,263	51.7
Not reported	7,395	4,470	60.4	2,079	28.1

percent of undergraduates felt that e-mail was a good way to maintain contact with classmates regarding class. Seventy-five percent said they used the Internet to confer with classmates about a group project, and 31% reported that they e-mailed classmates once a week or more.

The Internet has also become a primary resource of information for school reports and papers. According to statistics published on the Web site of the Association of Research Libraries (www.arl.org), reference queries at university libraries have fallen sharply since the late 1990s when Internet use became widespread. In The Internet Goes to College, Jones found that in 2002, 73% of college students used the Internet more than the library when searching for information. Only 9% of students said they used the library more than the Internet. Like high school students, college students felt that using the library was much more difficult than surfing the Web. Jones's Pew/Internet report on college life further revealed that when students were observed using school library computers, they were typically looking for information on commercial Web browsers rather than the library's Web sites. Many professors and librarians worried that the Internet has made students less adept at finding credible resources when researching a topic. These educators feared that college students were more interested in a quick fix than in sound research techniques.

College Students and Entertainment

College students use the Internet to entertain themselves much more than the general population. According to Jones in The Internet Goes to College, a little over three-quarters (78%) of college students went online for fun in 2002, versus only roughly two-thirds (64%) of the general online adult

TABLE 6.8

Public schools allowing student access to the Internet outside of school hours, 2001–02
	Internet available to students outside of regular school hours1		Time of availability2
			After school		Before school		On weekends
School characteristic	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002	2001	2002
1Percentages are based on the 99 percent of public schools with Internet access.
2Percentages are based on 50 percent of public schools (99 percent with Internet access times 51 percent allowing students to access the Internet outside of regular school hours) in 2001, and on 52 percent of public schools (99 percent with Internet access times 53 percent allowing students access to the Internet outside of regular school hours) in 2002.
3Data for combined schools are included in the totals and in analyses by other school characteristics but are not shown separately.
4Percent minority enrollment was not available for 31 schools in 2001. In 2002, this information was missing for 15 schools. The weighted response rate was 98.6 percent.
5Percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch was not available for 2 schools in 2001.
SOURCE: Anne Kleiner, Laurie Lewis, and Bernard Greene, "Table 8. Percent of Public Schools Allowing Students to Access the Internet Outside of Regular School Hours, by School Characteristic: 2001–02," in Internet Access in U.S. Public Schools and Classrooms: 1994–2002, National Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, October 2003, http://www.nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/publications/2004011/tables.asp (accessed November 22, 2004)
All public schools	51	53	95	96	74	74	6	6
Instructional level3
Elementary	42	47	94	95	69	69	4	6
Secondary	78	73	97	98	85	83	8	8
School size
Less than 300	47	49	91	93	79	79	9	7
300 to 999	47	50	96	96	71	69	4	5
1000 or more	82	79	98	98	82	84	7	8
Locale
City	49	55	96	99	64	62	4	9
Urban fringe	45	51	94	97	78	76	4	6
Town	52	50	97	98	78	76	3	7
Rural	58	54	95	92	76	79	8	4
Percent minority enrollment4
Less than 6 percent	50	52	95	95	84	78	6	6
6 to 20 percent	45	50	97	96	74	80	9	2
21 to 49 percent	52	54	95	96	74	77	2	6
50 percent or more	56	54	96	97	66	62	6	10
Percent of students eligible for free or reduced-price lunch5
Less than 35 percent	52	52	98	96	79	82	6	6
35 to 49 percent	50	54	94	95	77	75	4	5
50 to 74 percent	50	50	91	97	73	71	8	5
75 percent or more	49	56	95	95	61	57	3	10

population. In no area was this more apparent than with music. According Jones, 59% of online college students listened to streaming music on the Internet, as opposed to 39% of online adult Americans. Students were twice as likely to download music over the Internet than the general adult population. Only 28% of adults downloaded music in 2002, compared to 60% of college students. A full 44% of online college students took part in a file-sharing networks and shared files from their own computers. Only 26% of the general adult population took part in music file sharing.

In July 2003 Pew/Internet released another study by Steve Jones, Let the Games Begin, a survey conducted on the gaming habits of college students. The survey found that about 70% of college students played computer, video, or online games once in a while. Table 6.18 is a breakdown of what types of games college students played most. Some 71% said they played computer games. Video games and online games followed at 59% and 56%, respectively. The study speculates that these numbers had to do with accessibility of computer games. Computer games, such as Solitaire or Tetris variants, could be played on a laptop in class, in a computer lab, or wherever there was a computer. As to gender, men generally preferred to play video games, but a higher percentage of women played online and computer games. Roughly 60% of women played online and computer games, as opposed to 40% of men. The Pew/Internet report suggests that women enjoyed nonaction card and puzzle games, and these games could be found on a computer. Online games provided the benefit of anonymity, and many online gaming sites catered to women's interests and tastes. Video games, on the other hand, were often violent, and when they did feature female characters, the characters often had oversized breasts and were scantily clad. Of all those college students who did play games, most believed the experience to be a positive one. Half of the gamers, however, said that they used video games as a way of avoiding their studies.