Table 1: Percent of U.S. Households with a Computer By Income By Rural, Urban, and Central City Areas
|Less than $10,000||4.5||8.1||7.6||6.7|
|$75,000 or more||59.6||64.4||63.1||62.3|
Lower income groups tend to have a lower percentage of computer access. From the survey done by the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, computers were found in 6.7% of the homes with incomes of less than $10,000. This is compared to 62.3% of the homes with computers whose incomes are $75,000 or more.
Table 2: Numbers of Households With Computers By Income (in millions)
|Less than $15,000||2.5||4.7|
|$15,000 - $30,000||7.2||9.2|
|$30,000 - $50,000||9.7||15.7|
|$50,000 or more||8.2||24.4|
Similar findings were made in the US Census Bureau’s report. They found that the average income of a household with a computer is $52,036 compared to an average income of $27,425 in homes without a computer.
Figure 1: Individuals Owning Computers vs Income
40.1 million individuals who owned computers had an income of $30,000 or more. Only 13.9 milllion individuals who owned computers had an income of less than $30,000.
Table 3: Percent of U.S. Households with a Computer by Race/Origin by Rural, Urban, and Central City Areas
|American Indian, Aleut, Eskimo-non-Hispanic||15.3||23.7||25.5||21.5|
|Asian or Pacific Islander-non-Hispanic||33.7||39.5||35.9||36.4|
The ethnic group with the highest percentage of individuals with access to computers was asians at 36.4%, followed by whites at 28.1%. On the other end of the spectrum are blacks with 9.5% and hispanics with 11.9% of individuals with access to computers.
Figure 2: Access to Computers Based on Race
Data from the NTIA survey conducted in 1995
The NTIA survey also found that only 40% of black children had access to computers in school, contrasted to 60% of white students who have access to computers.
Table 4: Percent of U.S. Households with a Computer By Educational Attainment By Rural, Urban, and Central City Areas
|Elementary: 0-8 years||2.6||2.8||2.6||2.7|
|High School: 1-3 years||6.5||6.1||4.7||5.7|
|High School: 4 years||16.5||15.3||12.2||14.7|
|College: 1-3 years||32.7||29.9||27.5||30.0|
|College: 4 years +||51.2||50.7||47.0||49.6|
Individuals who attended college accounted for 79.6 percent of those who had access to computers. This is compared to a paltry 23.1 percent of individuals who completed high school or had less education.