LATROBE, PA – Saint Vincent College’s Bachelor of Science degree in cybersecurity was recently reaccredited as a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (NCAE-CD) by the National Security Agency (NSA) and Central Security Service (CSS).
The program was first accredited in June 2020; the accreditation must be renewed every five years. SVC is among 21 four-year colleges in Pennsylvania to receive the rating, which considers an institution’s curriculum, faculty profiles and qualifications and maturity of the program.
Dr. Anthony Serapiglia, who joined Saint Vincent College in 2011, is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Computing and Information Systems (CIS). When he first started at the College, cybersecurity was “a concentration, essentially a minor.”
“Over the past 15 years, we’ve built this program to where it’s at today,” Serapiglia said. “When you look at math, biology, physics … these are ancient traditional topics that you get degrees in. Cybersecurity has only been a degree recently in comparison to these things.”
Although Saint Vincent first offered a Bachelor of Science degree in cybersecurity in 2017, the discipline has been part of the College’s CIS program for decades. What was lacking, however, was the know-how to build a model curriculum. While Serapiglia brought a wealth of industry perspective to the cybersecurity program, a governmental component was absent.
“I started building the program while being mindful of industry perspective when I got here, then this program [National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cybersecurity] came along as taking the lead in an area that has a lot of different professional organizations and focused areas,” Serapiglia said, “whether it's policy and procedure in international relations or the technical aspects of fighting denial-of-service attacks and ransomware and malware and everything else that you hear in the news.”
Academic institutions may pursue NCAE-C designations, including cyber defense (NCAE-CD), cyber research (NCAE-R) or cyber operations (NCAE-CO). A key aspect of the creation of the NCAE-C by the NSA and CSS is that it allowed the federal government to help make new hires immediately useful.
“You have those clichés of having to train the new hire for six to nine months before they can be useful in an organization, and as a national security issue, they can't wait six to nine months to train new hires,” Serapiglia said. “They needed to know that as colleges were turning up cybersecurity degree programs, it was of quality, and it had a consistency and known set of skills that these graduates were going to be coming out with. And that's why we went this way.”
The first designation as an NCAE-CD in 2020 was the culmination of a roughly eight-year process. The initial process took longer as the Department developed new courses and modified others to align with the requirements of the NCAE-CD. This time around, the renewal served to ensure the College’s CIS Department is staying up to date.
“I am very proud of our cybersecurity degree to achieve this renewal of our program as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense,” said Dr. Stephen Jodis, dean of the Herbert W. Boyer School of Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Computing. “The review is thorough and examines our curriculum, the work of our faculty and the program’s interactions with the community. I appreciate the work of the department chair, Dr. Serapiglia, to guide the program and oversee the work needed to achieve this recognition.”
“We've always looked at that as a launching off point, not just a destination,” Serapiglia said of the reaccreditation. “We didn't want to just get that designation and say, ‘Hey, you know, here we are.’ We want to use it as a launchpad to be able to do other things.”
Among those other things is Saint Vincent College’s top-25 ranking on Cybersecurity Guide’s 2026 list of the premier cybersecurity bachelor’s degree programs in the United States. The College ranks 22 out of the 25 schools that made the cut. According to Cybersecurity Guide’s recent analysis, there are 206 higher education institutions in the country offering bachelor’s degree programs in cybersecurity.
Saint Vincent cybersecurity graduates have advanced to careers with a wide range of employers, including Bechtel Plant Machinery Inc., CloudStrike, Ingersoll Rand and US Steel.
“We’ve also had people who have had internships with the NSA, Department of Defense, Air Force and the United States Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS),” Serapiglia noted. “We had somebody actually on a naval base in Connecticut with NCIS and we had somebody on an Air Force base in Utah. At those kinds of agencies, the internships are as important as the actual job, because, well, they tend to need two jobs.”
Housed in the CIS Department of the Boyer School, the Bachelor of Science degree in cybersecurity combines a technically rigorous skill set with a liberal arts and sciences foundation while instilling the values of the College’s Catholic heritage and Benedictine tradition. It’s a recipe for success that Serapiglia acknowledges is different from other institutions.
“You're going to have technical skills, but it is the liberal arts education that really does get our students a job,” Serapiglia said. “You have to be globally aware of the environment and everything else that's going on … a real complex situation of a lot of different types of variables to understand what's going on.”
Citing a recent service outage by Cloudflare, a global network providing website security, performance and reliability services, Serapiglia said he believes that Saint Vincent students look at such problems through a different lens.
“That’s something that has a much bigger picture that's going on,” Serapiglia said of the service outage. “We produce students who think that way.”
