White House cyber grants target historically black schools

The Department of Energy (DOE) will provide a $25 million grant over five years to bolster cybersecurity education.

The grant will be spread among a group of 13 historically black colleges and universities, two DOE labs and the k-12 school district in Charleston, S.C. Norfolk State will be the program’s lead institution.

“This is the new steel mill writ large,” said Vice President Biden during remarks Thursday at Norfolk State University.

{mosads}”The premium on having the most professional cyebrscurity workfoce in the world has become apparent to everybody,” Biden said. “It’s like discovering a whole new both problem and opportunity.”

Demand for cybersecurity workers is growing 12 times faster than the number of cybersecurity professionals, according to the White House.

Biden cited the recent cyberattack on Sony Pictures as a catalyst. The hack devastated the film studio’s networks, exposed troves of internal data and almost caused the cancellation of a multi-million dollar comedy.

“It just made everybody realize, holy mackeral this is a problem,” Biden said.

The grant is the final component of the White House’s cybersecurity agenda it rolled out this week. In addition to the education funding, the administration proposed legislation intended to bolster student data privacy, create a federal data breach notification law and enable cyber threat information-sharing between the public and private sector.

“It is staggering what potential vulnerabitlies exist,” Biden said.

The funds are are designed to give students interested in cybersecurity the opportunity to take advantage of resources at historically black colleges and national labs.

Schools will be able to update their computer labs and establish remote teaching and extensive online research programs with the money, Biden said.

Opening the DOE facilities to students will also give access to internships and potential jobs, added DOE Secretary Ernest Moniz.

For instance, the Sandia National Laboratory in New Mexico “will be providing jobs to all your students,” Moniz said.

The focus on HBCUs is intended to correct the vast racial imbalance in the computer science field. Biden noted that out of the 3.6 million high school students that took the advance placement cybersecurity exam in 2012, only 3,000 were African American.

“That’s why we’re here at Norfolk State,” an HBCU, Biden said. “We can’t afford to have a gifgantic chunk of the population … left out of this opproitunty.”

Major tech companies have also received criticism after employment statistics revealed a considerable lack of diversity in Silicon Valley.

There is “tremendous pressure to get talended people in this area,” Moniz said. To do that, the government must work to get “more women, more minitories into these programs.”

— Updated 2:01 p.m.