The Next Digital Divide Isn't About Access. It's About What You Can Do Once You're There.

For years, we've measured the digital divide by asking the wrong question. Can people get online? It's an easy question to answer. Broadband coverage can be mapped. Subscription rates can be counted. Internet speeds can be measured. And for more than a decade, those measurements have driven billions of dollars in investment, federal policy, and public debate. We made the case for connectivity, and in many ways, we won it.

But winning on access didn't close the divide. It just showed us a deeper one.

The next digital divide isn't about who can get online. It's about who has what they need to turn connectivity into opportunity. And that gap, between being connected and being able to do something with it, is one that leaders across government, industry, nonprofits, and education have been slow to face.

Think about what it actually takes to apply for a job today. Most people assume the hard part is finding the right opening. It isn't. Before a real person ever reads a single word of your resume, an algorithm has already decided whether you're worth their time. Nearly every major employer now uses applicant tracking systems, software that scans, ranks, and filters candidates before they ever reach a hiring manager. According to a 2025 Jobscan analysis of Fortune 500 career pages, 97.8% of those companies use an applicant tracking system. That means the first gatekeeper in the hiring process isn't a person. It's a system. And getting through that system takes a specific kind of know-how: formatting your document the right way, matching the language in the job posting, uploading files correctly, creating yet another account on yet another platform, and following up without getting marked as spam. Nobody teaches this. None of it is obvious. And none of it has anything to do with whether someone can actually do the job.

That's what participation looks like today. Not browsing the internet. Not sending an email. Participation means being able to navigate digital systems well enough to compete in hiring, in school, in daily life, and in the economy. And by that measure, tens of millions of Americans are being left behind. Not because they aren't smart or motivated, but because the systems they're trying to use were built by and for people who already knew how to use them.

The numbers tell the story. In 2024, Pew Research found that only 57% of adults in households earning under $30,000 a year had broadband at home, compared to 95% of those earning over $100,000. That gap is about money, yes, but it's also about everything that follows from not having reliable access: the skills you never build, the systems you never learn, and the confidence you never develop. A 2023 report from the National Skills Coalition in partnership with the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta found that 92% of jobs analyzed require digital skills. The economy runs on digital. The barriers to getting in are not shared equally.

I know this from the inside. When I arrived at Columbia as a first-year graduate student in urban planning, I walked into a program that assumed I already knew things I didn't. We used ArcGIS to analyze geographic data, Stata to run statistical models, and Adobe Creative Cloud to present our findings. Our professors taught the concepts. Figuring out the software was on us. We learned from each other, Googled our way through it, stayed late, and figured it out.

I figured it out. But it would be too easy to say it was because I was smart or hardworking and leave it at that. The truth is more specific. I walked in with confidence, a particular kind of confidence that had been built up over years. I was always the kid people came to with questions. I remembered details that surprised people, made them laugh, made them trust me. I had already graduated from Columbia once. I had a track record. I had a voice in my head that said: you are someone who figures things out.

What I didn't have was money. I was raised by a single mother doing everything she could to keep us afloat. I grew up knowing we weren't trust fund babies, but it wasn't until I got to Columbia and looked around that I understood just how much less we had than many of the people around me. There were plenty of reasons I could have walked into that computer lab and shut down. Plenty of reasons the gap between where I started and what the program expected could have felt like too much. It didn't, because I had been given something that doesn't show up in any broadband map or skills report: the belief that I could figure it out if I put in the work. That belief didn't come from nowhere. It was built over years through relationships, small wins, and people who treated me like someone capable of more. It was more fragile than I knew at the time. And it's not something everyone gets.

Not everyone does. And that's the part of this problem that policy hasn't figured out how to fix.

We know how to build infrastructure. We've gotten better at funding devices and helping people afford internet service. We've made real progress on the physical side of digital inclusion. What we haven't done, not seriously and not at scale, is deal with the human side. The part where someone sits down in front of a computer they've never used for a task they've never done and decides whether to keep going or give up. The confidence that an unfamiliar system is something you can learn, not something designed to keep you out. The belief, which has to come from somewhere, that the digital world was built for you too.

Confidence is not a personality trait. It's something that gets built through schools, families, friends, support networks, opportunities, and experience. Which means it can be supported, or it can be left to chance. Yet many of the systems we interact with every day assume that confidence already exists. They assume people know how to navigate unfamiliar technology, troubleshoot problems, create accounts, upload documents, and recover when something goes wrong. What happens when the systems we build assume a kind of confidence most people were never given the chance to develop? A job training program that puts someone in front of a computer without addressing the fear they bring to it is a program that won't work. A digital skills class that focuses only on technical steps, and not on helping people feel like they can do this, is missing the most important part.

Here's what I'd ask of leaders across government, industry, nonprofits, and education: stop measuring the divide by connection rates alone. Adoption matters. Capability matters. Confidence matters. The people furthest from digital participation aren't there because they gave up. They're there because the things that build confidence, the encouragement, the families, the friends, the early wins, the adults who said "you've got this," never reached them. That's a fixable problem, but only if we're honest about what we're actually dealing with.

For leaders in every sector: the systems you build carry assumptions about who already knows how to use them, and those assumptions have real costs. Every job portal that takes four steps and three account verifications just to submit a resume is a filter. Every onboarding flow that assumes people already know the basics is a wall. Building for real participation means building for the person who has internet access but not yet the confidence to use it, and understanding that the distance between those two things is exactly where the divide lives.

Access was never the finish line. It was always just the starting point. For years, we've measured whether people could get online. The next challenge is measuring whether they can participate once they do. Because participation isn't just about devices, broadband subscriptions, or digital skills. It's about whether people have been given the tools, support, and confidence to navigate a world that increasingly assumes they already know how. We know how to measure connectivity. The harder question is whether we're willing to measure everything that comes after it.