While US students are bankrupting themselves to get a Computer Science degree they might wasting their time because the courses don’t cover important things like IT security.

A CloudPassage study reveals that none of the top 10 US university Computer science and engineering program degrees requires students take a cybersecurity course.

So while there is a cybersecurity skills gap there is a cybersecurity education gap in the top US undergraduate computer science and engineering programs.

An analysis of the top 121 US university computer science and engineering programs found that none of the top 10 requires students take a cybersecurity class for their degree in computer science, and three of the top 10 don’t offer any cybersecurity courses at all.

The higher-education gap in cybersecurity comes amid the backdrop of some 200,000 unfilled IT security jobs in the US, and an increasing sense of urgency for organisations to hire security talent as cybercrime and cyber espionage threats escalate.

Robert Thomas, CEO of CloudPassage, whose company conducted the study, says the security gap in traditional computer science programmes is worrisome.

“The results were pretty profound.  When we tested the top universities’ computer science degrees, it was disturbing to find that very few require any kind of cybersecurity instruction as part of the curriculum to graduate” with a computer science degree,” Thomas said.

He added that Universities had a responsibility to start moving to address bigger problems in security.

Only the University of Alabama, which is not ranked in either the US News & World Report or Business Insider as a top computer science program, required three or more cybersecurity courses, the study found.