Arizona State Wants to Revolutionize the College Transcript
Even as other industries move their records online, most colleges and universities rely on paper transcripts to document credentials and academic performance. Already boasting a reputation for innovation in higher education, Arizona State University is looking to revolutionize the way schools maintain academic records, making transcripts more portable and reflective of students’ skills and achievements.
In a press release, the university said that it will use some of the nearly $12 million it received from the Charles Koch Foundation to develop “a verifiable learner-owned record system that has the potential to replace current transcripts with a less expensive, competency-based credential that lives with the learner themself, rather than with various institutions.”
Derrick Anderson, an adviser to the president of ASU, told RealClearEducation that the university wants to adopt a transcript model like the one currently used by credit-card companies.
“This doesn’t have any money in it,” Anderson said, pointing to a credit card. “It has access to a database. When I swipe it, [the credit card functions] just like a little computer that’s linking up to a database. The database is the most important part there – the database tells the computer what my financial identity is.” He said digital transcripts could operate in the same way, owned by the learner rather than the educational institution.
In a manner similar to credit-card transactions, ASU hopes to produce digital transcripts that rely on “distributed-ledger” technology – portable databases of digital records that can be verified and accessed across institutions. Such technology was once prohibitively expensive, but Anderson said that distributed ledgers are becoming more affordable and have been adapted for uses beyond banking. He argued that the education industry will inevitably adopt the technology.
“We think that 20 years from now, you will have [a digital transcript], I will have one, my kids will have one. When my grandchildren start school, they will start kindergarten with a learner record – [and] you already do. You already do get a learner record, it’s just analog,” Anderson said.
For students, schools, and employers, the interactive nature of distributed-ledger technology will allow transcripts to better reflect students’ skills and qualifications. Distributed ledgers enable students and institutions to negotiate the materials included in students’ transcripts.
“The distributed ledger allows the school to go in and authenticate what it is that the student learned and how well he or she learned it, based on the school’s metrics,” Anderson said. “It also allows the student to go in and say, ‘Hey, I learned this,’ and to ask the school, ‘Can you go in and validate that I learned this?’”
Anderson compared this to the skills section on LinkedIn, where workers list their skills for employers and colleagues to verify.
Amber Garrison Duncan, a strategy director at the nonprofit Lumina Foundation, argued that reforms like the ones Anderson described are necessary to ensure that transcripts capture students’ actual skills and abilities.
“The current form of transcript was created to be an internal higher-education document, not something that the student uses or that employers use. When you look at the information that’s captured in there, it’s something that an internal registrar might use, but it doesn’t allow us to say what a person actually knows and what he or she can do,” Garrison Duncan said.
Both Duncan and Anderson told RealClearEducation that a central failure of academic transcripts is their focus on grades to the exclusion of students’ other skills and abilities.
But isn’t recording a student’s academic performance the purpose of a transcript?
“You may have an ‘A’ [in a particular course], but I [as an employer] can’t have an ‘A’ match the skills in the job description,” Duncan said. “So, I’m making assumptions about what was in that course, what you may have been taught, what you earned an ‘A’ in, versus, if I have the specific skill or competency information, I can understand if that’s a better match for what I’m actually looking for.”
Anderson thinks that transcripts don’t give employers enough information about the students they’re hiring. Digitizing transcripts and updating the material they contain, he argued, will make the documents more useful in the labor market.
“The downside to the ‘bureaucratization’ model of education is that everyone goes through the same process, and everyone has their own experience,” Anderson said. “But the process is so incapable of characterizing unique experiences that it leaves two people who are completely different to go into the labor market with the same exact profile and then have completely different outcomes.”
