It’s no secret that the education system is in desperate need of innovation and reform. From an anecdotal standpoint, most people have family, friends, or colleagues who at least have doubts about the efficacy and benefits of higher education specifically. We see questions in major magazines and news sites like “Is a college degree still worth it?”, “Should you still go to college?”, and “Do you have to have a degree to get a good job?”. These questions are symptoms of the mistrust and jaded conceptions people have about the return students get on their educational experience. Whether institutions and their stakeholders want to discuss ROI is irrelevant. If the students are talking about it, it’s important to consider. The current status of education as a slow, hulking, and innovation-starved machine has left it stranded in the ditch of “doing what we’ve always done.” Educators want to change education, but everyone has different opinions on how to do it, how much to do it, and when.

While there are a myriad of issues facing education today, I believe there are 3 glaring issues that higher education must tackle, before the tertiary issues can be examined. These are issues that the project I am a part of, Hedgefox.io, is trying to solve. We’ve made it our goal to directly impact these issues and make it a part of our purpose to tackle these first and foremost.

The first is student debt, which continues to rise along with the cost of tuition. Thanks to guaranteed students loans from the department of education, institutions are not incentivized to keep costs low when they have government-backed money being poured in through students taking out educational loans. The average bachelors student can expect to graduate with around $36,000 dollars in student debt. And while this may not seem like much, when you consider that the amount borrowed almost doubles for minority demographics, you can see why students are starting to question the value of their education, especially when there are many more hoops to jump through for little career gain vs not attending college. What if students didn’t have to take on debt at all?

The current system of accreditation works a lot like a social club or think tank. In order to become an accredited school or program, you must abide by standards set by the accrediting body - who, by the way, is made up of other universities and colleges who could potentially see any innovation as a threat and thus, deny your accreditation. This system is incredibly self-serving. Not only does it stifle new ideas in higher education structures, but it also has major impacts on students downstream. If you’ve ever tried to transfer credits, apply for scholarships, or apply for high-paying jobs, you know how frustrating it can be to navigate the accreditation landscape - it seems that almost everything hinges on accreditation rather than the actual instructional quality and competency of the graduating students. Accreditation was once meant for assuring students of rigor and quality, but has since become a weapon for silencing ideas, generating bureaucracy, and stifling innovation. What if accreditation was open, crowdsourced, and autonomous?

Speaking of open, the current education system is just now starting to realize the value of not playing cards so close to the chest. Through open educational resources (OER), institutions have been able to drastically reduce the cost of textbooks years over year for the past 4 years or so. They have been able to distribute and decentralize textbook creation simply by sharing knowledge and peer-reviewing it on a worldwide basis. And this is a good start! But there’s more that can be done. I believe that if someone wants to learn something, they should be able to, regardless of location, socioeconomic status, degree, or time spent in school. What do I mean by this? Think about the Reformation (remember Martin Luther’s 95 Theses?). The church had total control over what people learned from the Christian scriptures and how they learned it. With some willing translators and the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, suddenly everyone had the ability to read and learn for themselves. The same can be true of education. Will there be a need for colleges and universities as we know them today? I think so, but only in the same way we need churches today - as guideposts and communities, rather than arbiters and overseers of truth.

These problems cause I and some colleagues of mine to think deeply about how the crypto economy is uniquely positioned and able to help change education for the better. We have tools now that we’ve never had before thanks to blockchain technology. From our conversations came the idea for a project called Hedgefox. Hedgefox is a very early stage project seeking to help individuals and institutions rethink education at every level. Our focus is currently on building an MVP for a mobile-first dapp that pays its users to learn, create educational content, and peer review content. We have three main goals for the project which are to eliminate student debt, provide universal and verifiably credentialing, and to advance open education by reducing traditional academic knowledge silos. Hedgefox is able to achieve this through a unique tokenomics model that utilizes DeFi to pay its users based on their completion of work on the platform and being rewarded with unique NFT certificates that are personalized and immutable. Combine these facets with eventual staking and revenue sharing, education can become not only profitable for everyone involved, but also can help to provide quality education to anyone with the incentive to participate regardless of location, socioeconomic status, political affiliation, religion, gender, race, or disability.

Join us. We have more Mirror articles coming that discuss specifics about the project and how we hope to achieve our lofty goals. We’re building the dapp right now and would love for you to participate by joining our Discord, following us on Twitter, visiting our Website, and reading our Whitepaper!