Computer Support Blog

New aspects of education turn digital every other day it seems.  Test taking, grading, essays, and even college courses in their entirety have all taken advantage of digital advances in the last decade.  However, there is one small administrative detail that has shockingly remained exclusively paper-based through all that time: transcripts.  High school and college transcripts remain paper-based, which is highly inconvenient to both students and administrators.  It increases both the effort and time necessary to both order and process transcripts, as well as sending them between institutions when a student is graduating high school or transferring colleges. 

The reason such a seemingly menial piece of the education system has not updated to a digital format is concerns for security.  Transcripts are very important documents and authenticity is essential when evaluating them.  Up until now, most institutions believed digital documents were too easily forged and transcripts had to remain in paper form.  Cool person in technology Matthew Pittinsky believes he can change this situation as CEO of Parchment, a tech startup that is working to create secure digital documents that schools can use for transcript purposes.  Pittinsky also wants to make it easy enough for school officials to be able to create the secure documents that they won’t have to enlist the aid of remote computer support.

Parchment creates specially encrypted secure PDF files for schools to use as transcripts.  Pittinsky and his team claim that each PDF is actually more secure than even paper transcripts.  They back up this claim by saying that while you can forge a paper document, it is more difficult to forge the code that mark the Parchment’s documents as legitimate.  Of course, any officials who worry about possible digital forgeries can contact a computer support professional for an opinion on any document’s authenticity.

Pittinsky is an alumnus of American University, Harvard, and Columbia.  He holds a bachelor’s in political science from American while his master’s degree in education comes from rom the Harvard Graduate School.  He received his doctorate from Columbia in the sociology of education.  Pittinsky also has extensive experience working in the field of education.  He has been a professor at sociology at Arizona State University and worked for several years at Blackboard, one of the largest educational technology companies in the world.  Pittinsky’s experience with education helps him understand the field as he positions his startup to make significant changes in it.  If anyone can make these changes, it is likely Pittinsky can.

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Filed under: startups