A Theory Based Evaluation of Cybersecurity Education Trends in Public State Universities

The number of open cybersecurity jobs exceeds the number of qualified graduates, resulting in a workforce gap. A framework exploring this has proposed the problem has three dimensions: program offering, student pipeline and program capacity. Followup work has developed tools for measuring progress on program offerings with a cybersecurity education maturity model (CEMM). This work builds on the CEMM by first strengthening the model by connecting it to learning-network theory. The model is then applied to evaluate cybersecurity offerings in public universities across three states. Using the average CEMM scores across each state, the impact of state level investment is explored. We find that the states exhibited statistically significant differences in level of cybersecurity education maturity, and can identify specific years in which states made investments. We then argue for the importance of such quantitative measures and assessment of academic offerings in the efforts to remediate the workforce gap problem.