The Role of Federal Broadband Investments in Historically Black Institutions of Higher Education in the Rural Southeast

Five Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) received federal broadband funding. Each faced different terrain: different communities, different levels of trust, different local economies. So each built something different. This is what they built, and what happened. Across all five sites, we found the same underlying logic model at work: local context shaping decisions about infrastructure delivery, adoption strategy, and economic pathway, and those decisions galvanizing regional impacts. That structure is our central finding because it explains not just what happened, but why it wouldn’t have worked any other way.