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Cybersecurity Education in CCs Gets ED Boost

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 08/02/18
businessman pressing on virtual screen, selecting security icon

To help community colleges make technology upgrades that will help them deliver cybersecurity education, the U.S. Department of Education has been allotted $1 million in an omnibus spending law, H.R. 1625, approved by Congress earlier this year. According to an explanatory document that accompanied the spending bill, the money is to be spent on a pilot grant program to help the schools make their programs "state of the art."

In an application posted this week, ED said it would provide 10 two-year awards of between $25,000 and $100,000 each to the grantees. There was just a single priority referenced in the application: that applicants collaborate with one of the three Advanced Technological Education (ATE) Program centers in the country in making their improvements.

The ATE program, supported by the National Science Foundation, is coordinated out of three community colleges to support the improvement of cybersecurity education in both higher education and high schools. Those centers are the National CyberWatch Center at Prince George's Community College in Maryland; the CyberWatch West Center at Whatcom Community College in Washington; and the Center for Systems Security and Information Assurance at Moraine Valley Community College in Illinois. In turn, the centers coordinate a network of affiliated institutions, including hundreds of community colleges.

While the applicants don't need to have an existing relationship with one of the ATE programs, they must get buy-in (in the form of a signed statement) that a given center will help them in their technology upgrades.

The deadline for applications is Aug. 29, 2018. For more information, visit the application information page on the Federal Register.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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