We’re Finally Making Progress Supporting Rural Tech – We Can Do So Much More
Rural America wants to be part of the growing tech economy.
We know because rural Americans have told us — in a national survey, nearly 60% of rural adults expressed interest in tech jobs and careers, according to a recent report from the Center on Rural Innovation (CORI), a nonprofit I founded in 2017.
Who could blame them? The digital economy has been a reliable growth engine — expanding 3.5 times faster than the U.S. economy as a whole from 2005 to 2019 — and produces jobs whose median incomes are more than double that of all jobs nationally.
We’ve seen how the COVID-19 pandemic drew attention to the ways in which many rural communities are under-resourced to adapt and succeed in the digital age. Places lacking access to broadband are missing out on the power of the 21st-century economy. But the pandemic also proved that when rural America is connected it can support a thriving digital workforce.
