What They're Teaching Kids These Days: Comparing Security Curricula and Accreditations to Industry Needs

What They're Teaching Kids These Days: Comparing Security Curricula and Accreditations to Industry Needs

Security is hard, but security education may be harder. Few academic institutions have the skills or resources to dedicate solely to security education. Rather, most security programs in higher education have grown out of or have been welded on to other technology programs. The resulting fractured educational ecosystem has created a disparity in the skill sets of graduating students and has made it challenging to develop standards to ensure consistency across educational programs. This talk will take a look at how security curricula have traditionally been developed and continued to be shaped by a variety of forces. We will examine some of the proposed solutions for accrediting programs and analyze their strengths and weaknesses. Subsequently, we will try to determine which type of student each model is designed to produce and provide our own recommendations about how to standardize security education.

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