Best Cyber Security Degree Program (2021)

hey what's up you guys welcome back to my channel nicholas moy here uh i wanted to deliver on a video that is definitely long overdue i know i posted a comment in my channel notifying you guys that i was going to be coming out with a video talking about my you know degree my my my college experience pursuing my cyber security bachelor's degree over at western government university and just kind of do a review on their cyber program give you a lot of details in the inside scoop and also an insider's perspective and to be honest with you i haven't made a great effort to pump out that video um full disclosure as you can see my office is different right this is my home office my family and i just bought a home and we've been going through a lot of change um just you know getting things fixed at the new home buying furniture as you can see my office is kind of a mess in the background you can't really see because it's kind of blurred out but there are stuff everywhere we're still in the process of putting things up hanging things on the walls and just general decorating and all that fun stuff so um i say all that to say here i am i finally got my desk set up my camera's here my audio equipment's here and i wanted to make sure to deliver on that video that i promised a little while ago so um this video is going to be talking about my experience over at western governors universities bachelors of cyber security and i wanted to share with you all why i think it's actually one of the best cyber programs out there even though it's a completely online degree i think that it's one that's very very underrated and one that i would highly suggest you take a look at if you're looking to go and get your bachelor's degree and cyber security so before we get into the content i wanted to actually show you that i do have the diploma it is right here um yet to be framed i'm thinking sorry about the glare there you go pretty bad glare you get to see what's on my screen there nice um i wanted to show you that i did actually pass i passed past it's not a certification i graduated and i graduated back in april 2019 um my thoughts are i'm going to be hanging it on the wall behind me uh along with some certifications i have but just haven't gone to it just because everything's been so hectic um but yeah you know i have it out i unwrapped it and i wanted to make sure to you know take some time to talk to you about the program because that's what i promised and i want to make sure i deliver what i promise um so anyways let's go ahead and dive into the content and talk a little bit about the western governor's university bachelors of cyber security so we're going to be reviewing my screen here in a second but before i share it i wanted to actually kind of talk to you candidly about my experience uh leading up to western grammar university and pursuing and graduating my um graduating from my bachelor's degree program so i started out in pre-med before jumping over into cyber security full disclosure i've been doing it for a number of years i think i started out like when i was like 15 or 16 years old i kind of grew up in the consulting space because my dad owns his own business honestly my uncle owns his own business my cousins own their own business so it's like everyone does it business consulting in my family and so i kind of grew up around it and when i got to the age of you know graduating high school and moving into college i didn't really want to do it obviously i'm here doing it now but um i started out wanting to do medicine so i want to pursue a different track i went to a traditional brick and mortar university i went to a private university down in lakeland florida and i was pursuing um pre-med and did that for a little bit i did that for about two years and decided i wanted to kind of explore other fields so i was looking at the psychology and pre-med um and then realized that i didn't want to dedicate the next 10 to 12 years of my life in college accumulating all these hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of debt to become a doctor uh just to go and work to pay it off so i wanted to take a break after kind of reevaluating things and i decided to drop out of college i met my wife we got married and started a family and during that whole process of you know starting a family i decided i'm going to go ahead and revert back to it because i knew it and started working help desk and system engineering roles without a bachelor's degree around this time it's a i want to say it's probably 2015 2016 when i'm doing this and i had obtained my first certification i got my a plus obviously i knew how to do everything that was being tested on but uh within the a plus but um i didn't really have any certifications under my belt because up until then all my you know education was in medicine or in psychology not in it so i definitely had some catching up to do even though i had several years of experience in it and in cyber security doing you know remediation network security firewall configurations all that fun stuff i had done a lot of that early on while you know in part-time roles uh working with my my family and consulting companies um before jumping over into into medicine so going back you know after dropping out of college i went back to working uh working the ninth five for other you know ms mssps um or um in consulting firms uh doing it work and so i kind of picked that back up but i noticed that the salaries were limited uh i think i was restricted at about 50 to 55 000 a year before getting my bachelor's degree and no one was gonna offer me anything greater i didn't have any certifications i didn't have my degree so i said to my wife you know what i need to go back to school i need to begin beefing up my credentials and so i was looking around i looked at university of florida i looked at university of central florida fsu i looked at schools that were outside of my state i looked at various scholarship programs including the the one i think is called the cyber corps which is the united states scholarship funds that they actually give you grant money and you go to a school full time you can get a stipend while you're in school and while you're in that process you know you basically commit to the governments the the u.s federal government that once you graduate you're going to um work for them for a set number of years so like if you do a four-year program i think you give them four years as well so you have to work at a federal agency for four years and then you can graduate and do whatever you want so i was looking at various programs and uh i found western governors university and it really appealed to me because of a few different reasons they were highly flexible because it's completely online so it didn't require that i attend night classes with you know my family and having a day job i didn't have to go and leave my home to attend the school it was at my own pace so i could go as fast or as slow as i needed to in order to obtain the material test and move along and i'd say the biggest thing for me considering that i didn't have a lot of credentials going in to the degree program and that i needed to walk away with both certifications and a degree they actually offered that like part of western governance university's it program requires you to pass certification exams and those are your final exams from several of the courses and and the degree track that you go for and they have cyber security they have cloud engineering they have um i think they have like a health track a health it track as well they have a software developer track and every single one of these tracks has various certifications a couple of the core ones that are just going to be standard across whatever you know path you go down it's going to be you know your a plus your network plus your security plus but then after that you start to specialize into other um certifications and exams and courses that are going to be more specialized to whatever you know track you decide to choose and so being that i chose cyber security a lot of my certifications were around like encryption i have an encryption certification i have an incident handling certification um i got my itil which i think is standard across all the ite degree programs um what else did i get i got the sscp which is the ise square like mini cissp it's one that requires that you have some kind of job history at least a year of experience in the it fields and doing some security tasks before you actually obtain the certification they have to see the ccsp which is their certified cloud security professional certification and they just have a lot a lot of really great labs and learning materials out there and so i found that to be really really valuable now here's the beauty of it you're not paying anything additional for the certification exams or for the learning materials everything comes included with your tuition and the tuition is actually one of the things that really attracted me to it because for i now granted i went into this program with an associate's degree and you know general studies with an emphasis in pre-med um that gave me some leeway to not have to do this you know the the full four years like you would at a typical university but if you don't have any uh college anything if you don't have any college experience at all you can go to western government university and they will give you everything you need and if you do it you can actually get your bachelor's degree for under fifteen thousand dollars if you do it in the typical two-year time frame now let me backtrack and say that western governance university does not restrict you to how long you want to take or how long you take at all in your degree program you can go as fast or as slow as you want you're not paying per credit hour you are paying per term per six month term so you pay for two terms a year and you can cram in as many courses as many credits and as many certifications as you want within those terms now i'm going to go ahead and share my screen and we can dive into the details on why western governance university is in my opinion the best school to be attending okay so here i am at western governor's university's website i'm gonna post their link in the description below but honestly it's really easy to go to it's just wgu.edu it's a pretty cool site you know they've done a lot of updates since i've actually been on here um they only do online degrees so if you're looking for a brick and mortar if you're like one of those more more traditional people and you want to go into a university and and do you know your your degree your courses and all that this isn't going to be the place for you but if you are like me and you have a very busy life maybe you have a family and you're trying to just get your degree while you know managing life and everything that it throws at you this is a great program now i'm going to go ahead and say that this is going to be a little bit of a stretch for anybody who's used to the traditional way of doing school however i will say that's it's honestly easier in my opinion because sometimes the grading scales at universities are not always the most fair in my opinion and sometimes kind of subjective based on the teachers that you have with this it's pretty non-biased um and they do a very fair job as far as grading we can go into that into more detail if if anybody is more curious about how they do grading here at wgu but um i i think it's very fair and i think that the courses are easier i think that you know for for those technical people or people that want to get into it you know you have a lot of you know information on the internet that's at your disposal and you're not necessarily confined to just being tested on what's inside the textbook you can go out there and you know go to stack overflow or go to other sites if you need to other blogs and what have you to to obtain the educational knowledge that you need the materials in order to pass your courses so pretty great stuff now let me go ahead and jump over to what's under bachelor's degree let me quickly highlight real quick so they do have bachelor's degrees and they have master's degrees and here's the full list of what they do offer here they have cloud computing a bachelor's of science they have computer science they have cyber security data management data analytics they have standard i.t network operations and security which is another really good one they have cisco certs in there they have software development health information management that's one i mentioned earlier that i couldn't remember the name of and then they have a information technology management so it's like a business administration degree so let's hop over into their cyber security degree um so they call it the cyber security degree and information assurance i think it's the to be honest with you it was i'm looking at my diploma right now the cyber security and information assurance bachelors of science or you know flip that around that's what it is so it's it's cyber security and information assurance now to be honest with you doesn't really matter you know once you have the degree the jobs the the the hiring managers when they see cyber security it's just going to check the box it shows that you have the technical knowledge uh that you went through a computer science based degree program and you know you're going to understand the fundamentals of cyber security so that's that's good enough the information assurance piece is good for those that want to get into compliance but there again cyber security does do the job as well so it covers you on both ends so as we scroll down here we can see that you know the average um student or i should say that 70 of the students graduate within 29 months i don't know exactly how many months it took me to graduate i think it was about a year and a half so i want to say less than the 29 months um tuition right now is 3 550 i think it's gone up a little bit since i was there but still very very fair i did the math and if you multiply this by four you're still under 15 grand for an entire degree program so four being two terms per year this is your six month term and uh they do offer plenty of scholarships as well so even this overall cost will be reduced um let me quickly note here that if you're going to a traditional university you're gonna have to pay your tuition your room and board and you're going to have to pay your your textbooks and your materials as well that's not something that you have to pay for here uh everything at western governors university is digital unless you want to buy extra materials so like for the summer certifications i actually did buy the physical copies um i went out and would go to wiley or any other you know publishing company that offered the certification study guide and especially for the big ones i did purchase those like the security plus the sscp the ccsp i did i did purchase the study guides out of pocket honestly it's marginal it's like 50 bucks per book not really a big deal um but if you're if you're not wanting to buy the physical copies they do provide you the pdf copies and the actual courses that you you'll be you know in in the course application or if you will you know you're within your degree program once you log into your account so you'll have access to it you can access it on an ipad you can access it on any other tablet or your laptop um and it's fully interactive you can highlight it you can add notes to it digitally do whatever you want and so all that is included within this tuition cost so just for this tuition cost if we were to talk about the six months right the six months that we're talking about here um you're only paying three thousand five hundred fifty dollars let me go ahead and pull up a calculator so that you know exactly what we're talking about here so three hundred five five zero right and then we're gonna go ahead and multiply that by four terms so for fourteen thousand two hundred dollars you can have an entire bachelor's degree program completed now if i were to go to let's say university of florida and to do an online program with them which university of florida is a public school here in florida united states i'm gonna actually hop over to university of florida and and ucf so you guys can actually see how much it would cost if i were to go with a public school here in florida okay so here i am at university of florida's website if i go over to admissions let's see yeah i think it's admissions and i go to undergrad um beautiful campus it's a brick and mortar obviously i used to work actually just a block away from the campus and they have a lot of really great programs and all that stuff now let me just go ahead and say like if you're looking for the college experience the brick and mortar is the way to go if if you want to go and you want to meet friends and you want to be part of the fraternity or the sorority and all that fun stuff that's it i mean that's this is the college experience however you're going to be paying more you're not going to be able to balance other things like work necessarily as well i mean i guess you could pick up a side job or something like that but if you have a full-time career already doing this you know a brick and mortar night school and all that it's going to be really really difficult so that's another reason why i like western governors university but if i want to here let's see tuition and feasts we want to see how much it costs for undergraduate tuition so here we go so for 2021 2022 academic year here we got in-state so if you live if you're a florida resident your tuition for all things included right they're they're giving you you know computers cell phone calls housing costs food books and supplies notice that remember i told you it's like 50 bucks for each textbook and i think i bought maybe four the entire time i was in my wg wg program that's how much you're spending quite a bit um so you're looking at that's just for one academic year you're looking at 21 000 right so multiply that times the what four years so we're looking at uh 21 430 times four yeah we're looking at an eighty-five thousand dollar bachelor's degree program 86 86 grand so for for that's for the cost of attendance there and this is subject to change right so this could go up now i'm gonna go and fast forward a little bit and jump over to university of central florida and you guys can see how much it'll cost now so just you know if you're not from florida uh uf is a little bit more expensive than other public institutions so i'm gonna go and hop over to ucf which is a little less expensive notoriously but still you're going to see the cost difference there okay so here we are at ucf so university of central florida's sites now this is their online program this is ucf online so this is i think they have a hybrid program where you can actually go to some of your classes on the campus and then do the majority of it online um i won't go into the details on whether you know what's cheaper or what's not because that's not really the point of this video but i do want to quickly highlight the costs so let's see they're charging per credit hour all right and i think you're restricted typically with public institutions and private institutions you have like a limitation of like i think it was like 24 or 30 credit hours typically i think it's what you're allowed to take per semester um so if we were to let's say multiply this by the traditional let's see here they have a bunch of okay so for a florida resident it's going to cost 179 per credit hour if you're not then 715 so let's go ahead and do 179 times let's just say we have 12 credit hours all right so we're looking at 2 000 and then we want to multiply that times 2 for each semester and then we want to multiply that times four all right so a little bit more expensive not honestly that much different than wgu but still more expensive and again this is for their online program now let me quickly highlight here that ucf and uf and many other public institutions or you know just universities in general regardless of whether they're public or private do not provide it certifications as part of their curriculum you are paying strictly for the courses for the the experience for you know just the traditional way of doing college hopping back over to western governors university you're going to see that you get a lot more for your value so let's actually scroll down they actually have a list here yeah so 14 certifications are included with this degree program you get the ccsp you get the sscp you're going to get the a plus oh looks like they added the size of that was not there before that's nice so you can get the size of plus that right there uh if you look at you know a lot of job descriptions they are looking for that and that could be a alternative for the cissp in some cases you get the network plus um they do have some of these like additional combination certificates i guess through comptia which is like if you if you get the a plus or the security plus in the network plus you get like the network vulnerability assessment professional um so that's always nice you're gonna get your security plus your your project plus your pentest plus that's also new but they didn't have that when i was in that program so that's very cool and then you're gonna get your itil the secure infrastructure and it operations these are those bonus certs right they're not um they're not sorts that you get once you pass an exam you have to like pass more than one to get those so that's it and it's going to cover a lot of key subjects so standard info security web development network security scripting and programming web security cloud security all this stuff right here is part of the curriculum and it's going to be covered in your your overall degree program your overall experience so honestly this this is a really good school to go to um yeah there's just so much to to learn about here they do have um scholarships so if we go over to tuition and financial assistance or financial aid uh let's see what kind of scholarships they have so yeah so if you're going after a master's degree you can get this scholarship for 25 hundred dollars um here it is what's this code your own path scholarship up to five thousand dollars towards any wgu information technology degree which means that the cyber security one would count towards that so you could get up to five thousand dollars for that and if you're you know returning let's see scholarships are for new students and returning students so they give you some details there they do have competitive programs for scholarships let's see they have grants uh they have just all look at all this funding right here just so much opportunity to have you know the already very affordable tuition knocked down even more quite substantially honestly because if you can qualify for some of these like six thousand dollars i don't even know what this is this was not here when i was in in school but if you could qualify for that that right there is a hefty chunk out of your overall tuition i mean you're looking at going to college for basically pennies and you get cyber security certifications in the process guys this is there's no there's no better way than to go through western governance university i mean i'm a huge advocate and personally you know i'll be honest with you i'm actually looking at potentially getting my master's degree i was looking at all all of the institutions i was looking at johns hopkins uh capella i was looking at tons of other places and they want so much money and if i wanted to get my master's degree i know we're not really talking about that because we're the purpose of this video was talk about um the bachelors but if i wanted my master's degree look at the cost difference here it's it's so comparable you know i think what was the other one like 35 3 500 per per term this is 3 800 per term i mean this just gets me ticking like this right here is so affordable this is how all colleges should be doing it and if you're going into anything technical i think you should get certifications as part of your curriculum just because everyone knows that there's like three things that you need to get a job in it it's going to be the experience it's going to be that degree which honestly it's arguable you don't really need it but it's certainly helpful and it's going to be certifications like if you just got certifications and experience alone and you just scrapped the degree factor those two do make a world of difference those two will get you through doors and windows and just open up all kinds of opportunities so the fact that most universities don't even offer it certifications is a it's just mind-boggling i just don't understand but western governors does which is why honestly i rank it as number one on my list for anyone that wants to go into cyber security and needs a degree and this is a great path and i mean gosh eight hundred dollars thirty thirty nine hundred dollars let's round that up that's so fair um i feel like i've heard actually i know i know that i've heard of people passing their masters that they graduate with their master's degree in about a year so you're looking at what like seven eight thousand dollars for your master's degree that's pretty good that's pretty dang good so guys that's what i have for you this is western government university the best university if you are going after a career in cyber security again they got 14 cyber security certifications that are offered as part of the tuition i hope this was super helpful if you have any questions let me know drop them down in the comments section below if you want just say hey i know i've been absent for a little while but i am making a comeback i'm coming back strong i'm going to be publishing a lot more videos now that we're all situated here in our new home and i got this office so i'm pumped i hope you're pumped i hope this was helpful again reach out if you have any questions i'll see you soon

Channel: Nicolas Moy

Views: 3,714

Rating: 4.9534883 out of 5

Keywords: best cyber security degree, cyber security, cyber security degree, cybersecurity degree, careers in cybersecurity, cybersecurity, infosec, cyber security student, infosec student, cyber security education, cyber career school, cyber security course, python for cyber security, is a cyber security degree worth it?, information technology, information security

Id: OiJkDOL8pgE

Length: 28min 10sec (1690 seconds)

Published: Mon May 24 2021