Security Professionals Rank Pitt in Top Ten Cybersecurity Schools
A recent survey of 2000 IT security professionals, conducted by the Ponemon Institute and sponsored by Hewlett-Packard, has ranked the University of Pittsburgh as the seventh best school for in the country for cybersecurity courses and degree programs. University of Texas San Antonio, having fourteen undergraduate and graduate programs in areas such as digital forensics, secure design and intrusion detection and response, grabbed the top spot on the list. Pitt shares the seventh place ranking with George Mason University.
Survey participants were given a list of 403 educational institutions and were asked to select and rank up to five of the institutions in descending order of preference. Respondents were then asked to rate each school's program based on their perceptions about the school's academic rigor, faculty quality and other measures. Schools were assigned weighted scores based on how often survey respondents selected each school, the order in which they were ranked by each respondent and overall perceptions about program quality.
It is unclear how knowledgeable survey respondents were about each school's cybersecurity programs, but the survey seems to paint a fairly clear picture of what IT security practitioners view as the best schools for cybersecurity in the country. Like Pitt, most of the schools in the top ten are NSA- and DHS-certified centers of academic excellence.
Read more about the survey at Computerworld.