By At top US schools, students are intrigued by the proliferation of blockchain. This lends itself to the immense interest in the subject. Despite blockchain being renowned for cryptocurrencies, it has plenty of diverse applications.
Associate Professor of Computer Science, Emin Gün Sirer, at Cornell University, was to teach a module on blockchain technology. The course was traditionally intended for Ph.D. candidates. Typically, popular classes at Cornell, would have approximately 60 registered students in a particular module. However, the lectures on blockchain technology attracted 88 students on the first day, most of which were undergraduate students.
Coinbase, a cryptocurrency exchange, teamed up with Qriously to conduct a survey of 675 undergraduate students in the States. It was found that 9% of students have already taken a class related to blockchain or cryptocurrency and 26 percent demonstrated the desire to enroll for a course in cryptocurrency in the future.
Table 1: US Universities and corresponding blockchain related course titles
| University | Course Title |
| University of Pennsylvania | Blockchain, Cryptocurrency, and Distributed Ledger Technology presented by Professor Kevin Werbach and Professor David Crosbie. |
| University of California at Berkeley | Blockchain and Crypto Economics presented by Professor Dawn Song |
| Cornell | Cryptography |
Last year, Prof. Song had 25 spots available in her blockchain class, which had approximately 100 students wanting to enroll for the course. The interest is far from slowing down, despite the number of applicants dropping slightly after the 2017 bitcoin boom. Werbach speculates that the interest is due to work opportunities with start-ups, as well as major companies, for students who have an academic background in blockchain.
“Wharton sends people to all the Fortune 500 companies, and investment banks and technology firms. A very high percentage of those leading firms now have blockchain or distributed ledger projects, and they’re looking for expertise in that area,” Werbach explains.
Prof Werbach’s rationale can be substantiated, as on Monday there were 2770 jobs related to blockchain on the Glassdoor careers website. Vacancies related to bitcoin on LinkedIn has increased nine-fold in the financial services industry and four-fold in the software technology industry.
In 2017, the price of bitcoin rose from less than $1000 at the start of the year, to over $19 000 in December. This is likely to have heightened the interest of students, in addition to intriguing billionaire investor, Warren Buffett.
However, Prof Sirer urges caution to young people becoming overspecialized early on in their careers. He continued by explaining that learning overarching principles, concepts, and foundations underlying computer science and engineering are more valuable in a fast-paced, high-tech climate than becoming overspecialized in one area. 
Werbach explained that “in order to understand blockchain well, you actually need to learn a bunch of subjects that we already teach in the university, things like economics and finance and law and distributed systems in engineering,” Werbach explains. “I think someone who is taking a bunch of related courses because they’re interested in blockchain is going to get a well-rounded education that is going to serve them well and be useful even if this industry falls apart”.
Werbach is also of the opinion that the technology underpinning blockchain and cryptocurrency will remain relevant, even if the first-generation companies don’t last or if the price of virtual currencies plummets.
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