How disrupting is the use of blockchain for university resources? I came across an interesting concept. The use of blockchain technology to validate academic (and other) achievements. I could find that allegedly the office of the registrar's at Stanford is invested in this.
However, to gauge the potential, one would need to find out how many human resources are invested in performing the services that blockchain is supposed to automatize. It was suggested by some authors that cost could be cut here; but how large ist this effect really? 

For large and prestigeous universities, how many employees are busy all day long confirming to companies or other universities whether a student's transcript is actually legit?

I cannot imagine this to be any more than a handful of people?
The linked article is idiotic. This is an obvious application of digital signatures, not blockchains. The article dismisses digital signatures:


  The problem with using Adobe and Certificate Authorities (CAs) is that there are multiple points of failure - if a bad actor can fool a CA, then he can produce PDFs that look like they were signed by a university, but are in fact forgeries. Plus, the system is expensive and inflexible because it only works for PDFs


Only someone with zero understanding of cryptography would think that digital signatures only work with PDF files or can only be done using a particular piece of software from Adobe. The relevant technology is old, not patent-encumbered, and available in a huge number of free and open-source implementations.

Fooling a competent CA is probably much, much harder than fooling a university. But if some university feels somehow that they are more trustworthy than a CA, they can simply generate their own public/private key pairs.