Matthew Pittinsky calls it the “quiet revolution.” The CEO of Parchment and co-founder and former CEO of Blackboard has watched the relatively rapid shift from paper to digital transcripts with at least a bit of awe. He admits that as the CEO of a digital credential management company, he’s probably biased, but there’s no denying the fact that 20 years ago, well into the dot-com bubble, virtually no colleges sent or received digital transcripts. It took Parchment — originally Docufide — seven years to send its millionth transcript. Now the service processes that many transcripts every two months.
“Why print and mail transcripts when most receivers of them would prefer to get them as machine readable data and when most students would prefer to request them electronically and have them in digital form?” Pittinsky said.
Higher education institutions have moved en masse toward receiving transcripts digitally, but they’ve been slower to shift when it comes to sending them. Over the last few years, Pittinsky has watched the trend catch on rapidly across institutions. It doesn’t cost more money. Schools already charge for transcripts, so instead of putting that money toward staff time, it goes into vendor contracts. Mostly, Pittinsky said, the delay has been because of culture — getting comfortable with a new internal process, with the idea that digital transcripts are secure, and with the idea that receivers will accept the digital versions.