Digital Literacy of College Counselors from a Digital Divide Perspective: Challenges and Improvement Paths

Abstract

Educational digitalization has created new competency requirements for college counselors in ideological and political education, student affairs management, and online student development. Drawing on digital divide theory, this paper examines college counselors’ digital literacy from four dimensions: the access gap, usage gap, knowledge gap, and transformation gap. The study finds that current difficulties include unequal allocation of digital resources, differentiated application capacities, insufficient circulation of professional knowledge, and inadequate transformation of digital technologies into educational practice. These problems are rooted in insufficient institutional support, fragmented training pathways, organizational barriers to knowledge sharing, and lagging educational concepts. Accordingly, this paper proposes an access-guarantee mechanism, a competency-oriented tiered training mechanism, a co-constructed knowledge circulation mechanism, an application-driven practice transformation mechanism, and an ethics-embedded risk governance mechanism. These measures are intended to promote the transformation of college counselors from tool users into digital student-development practitioners.