How can on-chain credentials replace College Degrees
Is taking huge college debt a wise choice by any means
If you are currently in a college and you are also into Web3 then you might know that college education is broken, yet you haven’t dropped out, have you ever asked yourself why? The College education is broken where students graduate with no real-life skills, very few or no friendships (because of COVID), and massive debt.
This stuff has been talked about for years but we are nowhere close to solving it yet and I think this might change in the future because of on-chain credentials.
In the current system, it’s very easy to get a job if you are from Ivy-league colleges not because they teach something special but because.
a) They have some sort of entrance test to get in
b) They have very high fees
c) Limited seats. Having a college degree from IVY league colleges is a signal that you are smart and the network effects are also unbeaten.
You can get a job in any startup pretty easily if you have worked in FAANG companies or top startups like Stripe, Airbnb, Coinbase, etc but the thing is that people who graduate from IVY league colleges can get jobs in big tech companies just after graduation but it’s very difficult for people who graduate from normal colleges to get a job in these companies. A great college makes your life much easier but a normal college doesn’t. You might put an argument that on the Internet anyone can learn for free and get whichever job they want. While it’s true but the probability of getting a job in a big tech company becomes much lower and if a person didn’t to a good college then they also might not have their own network which they can leverage to find a job in FAANG.
The biggest issue that recruiters have is searching for hidden talent. It’s pretty easy to filter candidates who have an Ivy League degree but how to filter other candidates when you are a recruiter at a big tech company and you get 1000s of applications. A job applicant could have won a big hackathon, made an interesting side project but it’s very difficult to assess when there are no universal signals.
With blockchain, things became interesting because of DAOs and token gating. If someone has to join a Web2 company the only way to get in is to go through a recruitment process but DAOs enable anyone to become a contributor without joining it full time. DAOs are a good training ground for college students. Many DAOs reward contributors in the form of tokens and these tokens can be used for token gating jobs in the future. For Ex- For hiring Web3 companies to use platforms like Lever, Greenhouse.
In the future they can put a job posting and only the people who have earned tokens from contributing to, for Ex-Developer DAO can apply and this doesn’t have to be restricted to one token, logic gates like AND/OR can also be used for example you can only apply if you have Developer DAO tokens + Hackathon Token(Just, for example, Hackathon can winner get some token). This is simple stuff but more complex gating can be programmed and when decentralized notification systems are built a company can send a notification to the wallets that meet certain conditions encouraging the owners of that wallet to apply for the job
NFT gating job opportunities based on metadata can also be done for hiring people. If you are thinking how, well people who contribute to a Web3 project can be issued dynamic and non-transferable NFTs where their NFTs change with their contribution, some sort of like progression of a character in a video game and the non-transferable ensures that they are not getting misused. People can apply for certain roles only if they have X level or rarity to better understand you can think of a person who needs to be at X level to complete a quest.
This can also be done at an individual level also, there is an interesting project MintKudos that captures community contributions that are peer-verified. For-ex if someone builds a Notion doc that makes the onboarding process easier they can be given kudos. If someone explains a topic pretty well, you can give them Kudos. These Kudos can have various tags or maybe XP levls gating can be set by company employees or DAO contributors when they are looking to hire talent in the coming years. The beauty is since everything is on- a few years.
If you are in college don’t become too optimistic and drop out based on this sole reason, this is something that will take quite a lot of time to be used by Web3 companies. If you are in an Ivy League college, it makes sense, if not you should seriously think will a college degree be enough to get you a job in the hyper-competitive market. People complete their graduation thinking that their college degree will serve as insurance for their life but that isn’t sadly true.
In a few years, companies might discover hidden talent through dynamic gating and targeted notification mechanisms. If you want to chat more about this topic feel free to DM me on Twitter.