The next most important challenge brought about by the global pandemic and now facing higher education is diploma fraud (although student identity, as the lynchpin to widespread online cheating, is a close third). When university campuses shut their gates during the pandemic, many of the traditional paper-based processes were exposed as inefficient and insecure. Diplomas and transcripts are still today issued as paper copies, and when pressed to offer digital copies universities issue insecure versions that are easily fabricated or tampered with. By securely recording unique “fingerprints” (cryptographic hashes) of digital assets and solving the challenges of managing a decentralized public key infrastructure, blockchain technologies offer a simple, turnkey solution for issuing and managing university transcripts and diplomas, while potentially lowering administration costs.
