Blockchain-Enabled Digital Credential Verification for Higher Education

Abstract

Higher education institutions now issue degrees, transcripts, professional certificates and short-course awards across increasingly mobile academic and labour markets. Nevertheless, credential verification often remains slow, manual and fragmented, while excessive disclosure of personal academic information can expose learners to unnecessary privacy risks. The study proposes and evaluates a privacy-preserving blockchain framework that treats a credential as a verifiable cryptographic commitment rather than as a full academic record stored on-chain. The framework combines deterministic credential canonicalisation, SHA-256 hash anchoring, authorised issuer management, smart-contract lifecycle control, revocation status and Merkle proof support for cohort-scale verification. A controlled prototype evaluation used 1,200 simulated higher-education credential records covering active, revoked, tampered, expired, unauthorised-issuer and canonicalisation-error scenarios. The proposed framework achieved complete functional separation in the controlled corpus, with active-valid credentials accepted and invalid credentials rejected, while benchmark results showed stronger verification quality than manual checking, centralised lookup, a plain hash registry and a Merkle-only baseline. Local tests also showed that hash-anchor and Merkle proof checks added measurable but practical overhead, while preserving a much lower privacy exposure than full-document blockchain storage. The contribution is an engineering model for higher education that keeps student records off-chain, stores only minimal proof and lifecycle metadata on-chain and provides verifiers with a clearer basis for trust, status awareness and auditability.