Development of Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Cybersecurity Program: A Literature Survey

Individual dependency on digital systems is continuously growing. Cybersecurity modeling and operations are deemed mandatory to secure these digital systems. Providing current students and future employees with advanced cybersecurity skills is an urgent requirement. As an initiative to address this expanding demand, this study aims at surveying the current undergraduate interdisciplinary cybersecurity programs adopted by different universities. The survey scope covers three main schools and the interdisciplinary relationships among these programs. The schools include the electrical and computer engineering departments in the school of engineering, the computer science departments in the school of sciences, and the computer information systems departments in the business school. The objectives of the survey are three folds; first identifying the program structures in the surveyed universities. The second objective is to determine the interdisciplinary basis on which the three schools collaborate to boost the student learning experience and to cover cybersecurity basic and advanced concepts from multiple dimensions. The last objective is to determine a roadmap that can be adopted by the cybersecurity cluster team at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona (CPP) based on the outputs of this survey to develop an interdisciplinary program. A broad range of universities from research, teaching universities and community colleges are covered in the survey. An analysis of the data collected from surveying the literature is conducted and the results are tested for significance. Finally, recommendations based on the analysis are summarized to aid other interested universities in developing new programs.