It’s one thing to not be able to afford a college education. It’s an entirely different issue altogether when you don’t even have a college around you.

A recent report from Jain Family Institute (JFI) reveals that access to college isn’t just about the cost of college. Physical access to public higher education institutions across America has also been highly unequal.

Specifically, as detailed by JFI’s interactive map, regions in America’s West have little-to-no access to an institution of higher education, compared to the East Coast.

“One of the major takeaways when you're looking at the map is the staggering amount of populated areas that are considered highly concentrated,” Laura Beamer, higher education finance project lead at JFI and one of the two authors of the study, told Yahoo Finance. “We figured out that roughly 2.4 million prospective students have access to most one public option nearby … Though financial access is extremely important, geographic access is also a very important piece of this dialogue and should be talked about more.”

View photos The concentration of higher education institutions across the U.S., based on whether they were accessible within 30 mins, if one was driving. Red indicates that they were few or no schools within that range, green indicates the opposite. (Graphic: Jain Family Foundation) More

The Rocky Mountain region “is the worst off,” the report added, “followed closely by the Plains region.”

The JFI report — which drew on various points of data from the 2016-17 Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, enrollment data from 2017, the 2016 5-year population, and median income estimates from the American Community Survey, driving durations to higher ed institutions in the area, zip codes, and more — created a “School Concentration Index” which measures the variation across the higher education market across different types of schools in the U.S. and U.S. territories.

Four states — Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, and Wyoming — were found to have higher education institution monopolies or close to it, meaning that there is only one institution or very few schools to choose from.

View photos Graduates toss their caps in the air after receiving their diplomas at Silver Creek High School in Idaho. (Photo: Matt Jonas/Digital First Media/Boulder Daily Camera via Getty Images) More

‘Prime hunting ground for for-profit institutions’

The authors found that a highly concentrated zip code (in red) means that there are few — or in some cases zero — higher education institutions in the area. A low concentration implies that there are a wide variety of options available for prospective students.

In the U.S., 38% of the population lives in highly concentrated zip codes, where they have access to very few or no higher education institutions, according to Beamer and her co-author Marshall Steinbaum, who is also an assistant professor of economics at the University of Utah. If a student from these areas wanted to attend a college or university, their commute would be at least 45 minutes.

The unequal access has wide-ranging implications for prospective students, most of them negative.

Parts of the U.S. where there’s “little to no access” to a higher ed institution “are prime hunting ground for for-profit institutions, just as they are known to draw disproportionately from populations historically excluded from traditional higher ed on the basis of race and class,” the authors argued.

The for-profit higher education sector saw tremendous growth since the financial crisis. In 2016, the New York Fed noted that enrollment at these schools had “skyrocketed” as the country emerged out of the Great Recession. For-profit colleges have also been known to saddle graduates with high levels of student debt, and in some cases, provide low-quality education with false promises of job placement.