There is an ongoing debate on the rising cost of higher education in the US. Tuition at 4-year colleges and universities has increased 150% over the last 30 years. In typical economics, this would have pushed the price of college out of reach of most students. However, due to the easy availability of federally backed student loans, many college students took on debt in order to earn their degrees.
Due to the levels of borrowing to pay for higher education, more than 44.7 million US students accumulated student debt. By recent estimates, student debt ($1.46 TN) is larger than credit card debt ($0.87 TN). Around 14% of US adults have student debt. As the chart below shows, student debt has skyrocketed since the early 2000s and now surpasses both auto debt and credit debt.
In the following video, Dianne Sieber makes a compelling case for the application of Blockchain to addressing the cost of college. You can begin this part of the talk at timestamp 7.40. Dianne talks about how Blockchain could be used to verify and stitch together many different learning experiences from across the world into a kind of "Blockchain transcript". This would at a global level lead to people around the world pursuing a University education.
If this kind of approach could be developed (possibilities do exist in the form of the ODEM Blockchain which I will describe in a later post) then students all over the world could use free and open resources to learn materials. A portal of self-study courses and assessments could be created and as students got verifiable certificates through these, then they could earn a degree. That degree could be partly or totally free or at such low cost that students could pay out of pocket.