Abstract The rapid digitalization of management of academic record has amplified persistent concerns related to data breaches, document forgery and the shortcomings of centralized verification frameworks. Traditional databases of a university system relied on institutional trust and fragmented infrastructures, which limits cross-platform integration and leads to exposure of sensitive records to single failure points. This paper introduces a hybrid architecture integrating blockchain technology and the Inter Planetary File System (IPFS) for supporting secure storage and decentralized verification of academic documents. In the proposed model, academic records are first encrypted and then stored off-chain in IPFS. The cryptographic hashes and identifiers of content are recorded on the blockchain immutably through smart contracts, thus ensuring integrity, traceability and authenticity without incurring excessive storage costs for on-chain. The architecture ensures decentralized verification by permitting third-party stakeholders for validating documents through comparison of hash and contract-based proofs. This eliminates the need for validation processes that is manual or institution-specific. A comprehensive evaluation of security and performance demonstrated that the hybrid approach substantially improved scalability, reduced operational costs and enhanced privacy as compared to solutions that were completely centralized and blockchain-only. The findings indicated that blockchain and IPFS can be effectively integrated for establishing an interoperable, resilient and trust-reduced infrastructure for management of academic document in ecosystems of higher education. Keywords Blockchain, IPFS, Academic Documents, Distributed Verification, Data Integrity, Smart Contracts