Education and Communication in Urban Colombia

Based on our urban survey education levels and socio-economic levels are closely linked, with a far greater proportion of high-SES individuals showing high levels of educational attainment (see Chart 1). Therefore, ICT access trends related to education should also be viewed in the context of socio-economic levels.

Chart 2

Education’s Influence on Mobile Communications and the Internet

• Nearly all respondents who said they were internet users (respondents who have used the internet in the previous month) also said they had education beyond the primary level (Chart 3), pointing to the importance of secondary education as an indicator for e-skills. [1]

Chart 3

• Note that more robust internet activity by those with higher levels of education also seems to reflect this group's greater levels of home and work web access, as it grants great flexibility of use.
• As the above table indicates, visiting social networking sites has become a popular web activity among internet users. How internet users with different education backgrounds use these websites varies. Interestingly though, users with a university level education are much more likely (77 percent monthly) to join or participate in online groups with similar interests than those with a secondary or technical degree, (36 percent and 35 percent respectively).
• The types of blogs that different education groups gravitate toward are also fairly variable. The most popular type among all education groups are news blogs, while the least popular are political blogs.

Chart 4

Traditional Media: Radio, Television and Newsprint

Chart 5

• As Chart 5 helps to illustrate, urban Colombians of all education levels show a great thirst for media. In regards to television, respondents reported nearly universal daily and weekly use.
• The Colombian government’s policy towards radio broadcasting has emphasized diversity at the national and local levels, leading to a wide variety of stations-particularly community radio stations-on a number of frequencies,. As indicated in Chart 6, survey respondents with no education or a primary education are much more likely to listen to the medium wavelength, the waveband used by the popular Radio Cadena Nacional (RCN) network and often by community radio stations.
• Given Colombia’s high literacy rates, the gap in weekly newspaper readership between education groups seems to be the result of socio-economic differences as opposed literacy problems.

Chart 6

Media Perceptions

Chart 7

• Even though there are strong opinion differences among education groups in Colombia’s level of media freedom (Chart 8) and the level of economic influence in the media (Chart 7), education groups do share some similar media perceptions.
• There is a high level of agreement across all educational groups that the government influences the media. Seventy-five percent of respondents with no education or a primary education somewhat or strongly agreed that the government influences the media, and seventy-six percent of respondents with a university education agreed with that statement.
• At the same time, survey respondents among all education groups reported a high level of trust in the media. Sixty-eight percent of respondents with no education or a primary education said they somewhat or completely trust the media. In addition, seventy percent of respondents with a university education hold a level of trust in the media.

Chart 8

[1] The number of survey respondents with either no education or only a primary education that are internet users failed to reach the statistical threshold for the analysis of this chart.