Bandwidth Gap Grows Between Doctorate and Other Institutions

The technology infrastructure of postsecondary institutions continues to improve -- but the gap between doctorate and nondoctorate institutions, as measured by bandwidth, is also growing, according to a report released by the National Science Foundation. The report contains a wealth of information about the cyberinfrastructure of colleges and universities, including data on the speed and types of institutions' connections to the Internet generally and to research networks in particular, and access to high-performance computing systems. While the data show that higher education as a whole is hurtling forward into better, faster technology, it is doing so unevenly, with the gap widening instead of shrinking. In 2005, 24 percent of doctorate-granting universities and 14 percent of non-doctorate-granting institutions had total bandwidth of at least 1 gigabyte; by 2007, those figures had risen to nearly 39 percent and 20 percent, respectively. (The study estimates that the numbers by 2008 had changed to about 50 percent and 25 percent.) And 62 percent of the non-doctorate-granting institutions had bandwidth of 100 megabytes or less, compared with just 24 percent of doctorate-granting institutions.