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Coinbase has a tendency of engaging university students across various countries to be part of their recruiting efforts. Adoption for blockchain and the industry has continued to develop exponentially especially this current year 2018.
While the contemporary news on the increase of crypto adoption in inflation-affected countries like Venezuela, it’s quite transparent that cryptocurrency plays a significant role in the future of finance regardless of whether it will continue to be a priceless asset for wealthy investors looking to make some quick profits or not.
Higher education and cryptocurrency study
The famous US-based crypto exchanger –Coinbase partnered with Qriously to find out directly from the students their thoughts about blockchain and crypto in general. The study involved 675 university students from 50 international universities. The findings were outlined based on the growing roster for blockchain and crypto course.
The results were overwhelmingly affirmative for the adoption and growth of the cryptocurrency industry with 42% of the top international universities having one or more courses for blockchain and/or cryptocurrency development.
Majority of the listed courses mainly landed on business, law, finance, and economic departments, with a somewhat smaller fraction getting recorded in the social science department. Apparently, the US-based colleges and universities appeared to be the most popular with Stanford and Cornell setting the pace by offering 10 and nine classes respectively.
Among other universities that topped the list include the University of Pennsylvania which hosted six classes relate to crypto and blockchain.
Coinbase further interviewed several students and professors in these universities to ascertain the response and excitement towards this developing educational field.
Dawn Song a University of California computer science professor and establisher of Future of Technology, Business, and Law and Blockchain Crypto-economics, said that her new curriculum seemed to be met with massive enthusiasm adding that she had to unwillingly turn away over 200 students who showed interest in participating the 70-people class.
She also explained how she felt and viewed the education part of blockchain and crypto as having a significant overlap on other departments in the future.
“Blockchain combines theory and practice and can lead to fundamental breakthroughs in many research areas. It can have really profound and broad-scale impacts on society in many different industries.”
In their results and findings, they outlined the developing roster of blockchain and crypto courses amid an invariable rise in student and lecturers’ interests.
David Yermack, a finance department chair in New York university—”Stern School of Business”, when he first started his course on financial services and blockchain in 2014, only 35 students showed interest and signed up – a shortage of eight which is the school’s apparent requirement.
The rising interest in crypto courses
By 2018 spring season, the number of signed up students had risen to 230, making Stern to shift the particular class to one of its largest auditoriums. Yermack is expected to teach the blockchain course, this academic year both semesters to maintain the interests of students.
Yermack explained that he first created the class because he was driven by the interest in bitcoin mining and how the whole cryptocurrency field was massively growing. Other reasons emerged, most precisely the demand from various companies for individuals who understood crypto-related matters. Currently, he views his classes as a fundamental way to provide students with the skills they will need to acquire these vacancies in future.
“A process is well underway that will lead to the migration of most financial data to blockchain-based organizations,” he says. “Students will benefit greatly by studying this area.”
Similar experiences have been reported in top international universities across the globe where students are flocking to the various blockchain and crypto classes in high numbers. The institutions, in turn, have developed more research centers and increased the number of crypto-related courses to sort out the rising demand and another crucial reason being because they see a future in the cryptocurrency area for academic study.
Meeting the rising demand
John Hopkins University provides business courses on the blockchain, whereby the students study about the security features and also the potential weaknesses as well as benefits of the fundamental structure as taught to organizations and businesses.
In Princeton, students may choose to pick an information-security class paying attention to legal and ethical issues, related economics, the blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and secure computing systems. Currently, Cornell University is among the universities with a high number of classes including blockchains, cryptocurrency, and cryptography.
Some of the courses being undertaken include Smart Contracts, Cryptocurrencies, Introduction to Blockchains, Anthropology of Money among others. Most universities tend to offer at least a single class on cryptography—the study of solving and creating coded messages and the primary technical foundation cryptocurrencies and blockchains.
Stanford, on the other hand, this summer launched a “Center For Blockchain Research”, to get together the faculty and the students from across the university’s departments to work on a range of blockchain and cryptocurrency aspects.
Dan Boneh, electrical engineering, and computer science professor in the same university, stated that each time he speaks to a new team in any of the groups, he always found himself walking home with more than two research ideas.
“There are new technical questions being raised by blockchain projects that we would not work on otherwise,”
Other top universities offering crypto and blockchain with strong engineering programs have also incorporated programs and courses around the blackchin niche. The University of Illinois, University of Waterloo,and the Georgetown University are some excellent examples of schools expanding their course offerings and research bases.
Students’ views
Students showed interests across various fields. In fact, more of the 47 percent on the science majors stated that they were only interested in studying about blockchain and cryptocurrency than engineering majors and computer science.
The Coinbase study also found out that 17 percent of many of the above-mentioned fields have already enrolled in blockchain and cryptocurrency courses, while 15 percent of math majors, economics, and 11 percent of the business majors and only 5 percent of all the Social Science majors had taken the course. 17 percent of the students confirmed and acknowledged that they considered their knowledge on blockchain and cryptocurrency to be very good.
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