Arizona State is building a blockchain-powered platform to share student records between community colleges and universities. Will other institutions embrace it?
Thousands of community college students transfer to Arizona State University every year, some before obtaining their associate’s degrees. While many will successfully graduate from Arizona State with a bachelor’s degree, the remainder risk joining the 37 million Americans with some college credit but no degree.
To counter this, Arizona State is working with local community colleges to share transfer students’ academic records, enabling colleges to monitor when their former students have earned enough credits to be awarded an associate’s degree — a process known as reverse transfer.
But this process is far from straightforward. Data sharing is dependent on students’ permission, and communication between the university and the college can be stilted. Additionally, community colleges have to decode student records presented in different formats and decide whether the courses students take at a university are equivalent to their own.