Impact of Resource Scarcity on Creative Potential in Higher Education: A Mixed-Methods Study of Digital Media Students

Abstract

Modern higher education curricula place a strong emphasis on digital innovation and creative risk-taking to prepare students for the demands of the global media industry. However, evaluating student output based solely on intrinsic capability often overlooks the critical variable of institutional infrastructure. The study counters the existing pedagogical deficit model, which often blames the lower fidelity of student media output in developing institutional settings on the absence of intrinsic motivation or underlying competence. This study uses a parallel mixed-methods design, triangulating self-assessment measures of quantitative data with environmental realities of qualitative data on digital media students (N = 31) at Kabarak University, Kenya. Quantitative data indicates the strong background of creative self-efficacy, as 71.0% of students mentioned that they had the necessary skills to develop professional content, and 67.7% of students are engaged in the exploration of new methods of storytelling. Nevertheless, qualitative thematic analysis shows that harsh realities in the environment, namely acute shortages of hardware and network instability (mentioned by 63.6% of participants), systematically undermine these intentions. As a result, this paper presents the notion of theoretical creativity: a phenomenon where students have the cognitive imagination to be creative but do not have the physical affordances to implement, and are forced to routinely demote the complex projects. The findings indicate that navigating this second-level digital divide reduces the educational experience from creative problem-solving to logistical survival. The study concludes that relying on student "forced resilience" is pedagogically unsustainable; institutions must reclassify high-performance digital infrastructure from peripheral administrative overhead to a mandatory core pedagogical requirement.