http://www.fcw.com/fcw/articles/2002/0422/web-schol-04-23-02.asp

By Graeme Browning
April 23, 2002

An 18-month-old scholarship program designed to encourage college
students to work for the federal government as information security
professionals after graduation provides so few real-world incentives
that it's almost counterproductive, some noted academics in the
computer security field said recently.

The National Science Foundation's Scholarship for Service is "a
wonderful idea, with the emphasis on the word 'idea,' " said Matt
Bishop, a computer science professor at the University of California,
Davis, who specializes in the design of secure systems.

The program offers two-year scholarships to students who commit to
serving in government security positions for two years as part of the
Federal Cyber Service. It originally was modeled after the Reserve
Officers Training Corps (ROTC) scholarship program, said Blaine
Burnham, founding director of the Nebraska University Consortium on
Information Assurance (NUCIA) and a former information security expert
for the National Security Agency.

"But the federal government invested a lot of money to get ROTC
going," Burnham said. In addition, with universities nationwide
lacking information security specialists, "where are you going to get
the faculty" to teach it?

Bishop and Burnham spoke April 22 at Infotec 2002, an information
security conference in Omaha, Nebraska, sponsored by NUCIA and the
Association of Information Technology Professionals.

UC-Davis, which has one of the premier computer security faculties in
the country, did not apply to become one of the schools participating
in the Scholarship for Service program because officials were not
certain that enough students would sign up to justify investing
precious funding, Bishop said.

Government salaries are so low in comparison to the salaries that
security professionals can make in industry that students prefer to
take out tuition loans and repay them after graduation instead of
accepting the scholarship, he added. "They just don't see [the
Scholarship for Service program] as that great a deal," he said.

Besides raising pay levels for graduates of the program, the NSF also
should vary the requirements for the scholarship and the commitments
required after graduation, Bishop and Burnham said. Some students, for
example, want to work for the Defense Department and would be more
interested in the scholarships if they weren't required to work in
civilian agencies, the professors noted.

-
ISN is currently hosted by Attrition.org

To unsubscribe email majordomoattrition.org with 'unsubscribe isn'
in the BODY of the mail.

• Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ]