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"Los Angeles Public Library is now adding another innovation to this lengthening list: It's planning to offer high school diplomas. The library announced Thursday that it will work with a private online education company to offer classes for high-school credit with in-person support at individual branches. The program is geared toward adult drop-outs, who would ultimately receive a diploma, not a GED."

How updating the communication device known as a "diploma" will help students acquire the right skills and help companies hire the right talent.

"Last fall, Alberta Education sent two 2013 diploma-exam questions along with nearly 1,900 student essay answers that had been graded by teachers to LightSide, a Pennsylvania company that develops computer software to score student essays. LightSide's automated algorithms outperformed human reliability in the Alberta study by about 20 per cent, said the company's January 2014 report to the government."

"When a college goes out of business, all of its alumni can suddenly find themselves in an unexpected dilemma: How can graduates prove they actually earned their degrees when no one is left at the institution to send academic transcripts to prospective employers or graduate schools? That scenario is one reason that a group of nine universities, led by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, today announced a collaboration to build a system that would let institutions issue digital diplomas and credentials in a way that can be verified without needing to check with a human registrar. The idea is to encourage widespread use of digital credentials across all kinds of academic institutions, and even at more informal places of learning, so that students end up taking ownership of how to communicate their learning to employers."

The idea that a college diploma is an all-but-mandatory ticket to a successful career is showing fissures. Feeling squeezed by a sagging job market and mounting student debt, a groundswell of university-age heretics are pledging allegiance to new groups like UnCollege, dedicated to "hacking" higher education.

"To start college, the typical student must meet admission requirements (if any), enroll and pay tuition. But what if anyone anywhere could try out a prominent university's classes for a small fee and wait until the end to decide whether to pay tuition for credit toward a diploma? That is one of the groundbreaking ideas behind an Arizona State University plan, announced Wednesday, to offer a freshman curriculum online through the nonprofit Web site called edX."

""I'm a survivor of that teardown mode of the '70s and '80s, that college-for-all thing," he said. This has had the unintended consequence of helping flatten out or steadily erode the share of students taking vocational courses. In California's community colleges, for instance, it's dropped to 28 percent from 31 percent since 2000, contributing to a shortage of trained workers with more than a high school diploma but less than a bachelor's degree."

"In 2016, more than 40 percent of all students who started at a four-year college six years earlier had not yet earned a degree. Odds are that most of those students never will. In real terms, this means that nearly two million students who begin college each year will drop out before earning a diploma."

"Would you rather spend four years plodding toward a diploma, or networking with Wall Street CEOs and diplomats as a member at US president Donald Trump's exclusive "Winter White House" resort in Florida? For some people, the latter would be far cheaper."

"Chester Ludlow, a pug dog from Vermont, has been awarded an online MBA degree (Masters in Business Administration) by Rochville University-an online college that offers life experience online degrees. Chester is believed to be the first dog to be awarded an online masters degree based on work and life experience credentials. But did he earn it-or did he buy it?"

"Our mission is to create a trusted, distributed, and shared infrastructure that will become the standard for issuing, storing, displaying, and verifying academic credentials, digitally."