Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences – Emphasis in Cybersecurity Online
Take the next bold step in your career with this flexible, accelerated program for AAS graduates. Complete your cybersecurity bachelor’s degree online and finish faster, whether you're ready to level up your skills or enter this exciting field.
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Program Overview
Earn your cybersecurity bachelor’s degree online and meet the evolution of technology with future-focused skills
The fast-track Lamar University Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences – Emphasis in Cybersecurity program is tailored to AAS graduates, providing an efficient pathway to degree completion. Finish your remaining undergraduate coursework and focus on developing professional leadership, problem-solving and communication skills that prepare you for promotion or a career pivot to this exciting industry.
Build on your AAS transfer credits with cybersecurity courses in networking, programming, AI and cybercrime forensics. Study whenever you choose from any location with 100% online courses that are available 24/7.
Upon graduation, your diploma will reflect the Bachelor of Applied Arts and Sciences degree. Emphasis areas will not be noted.
In this cybersecurity BAAS program, you will:
- Learn personal productivity concepts to help achieve goals in a professional context
- Create a clear and compelling vision statement and apply strategies to time management in your profession
- Develop and apply strategies for goal setting and task prioritization around various professional roles
- Develop a technology and energy management plan for use in professional environments
- Learn personal productivity concepts to help achieve goals in a professional context
- Create a clear and compelling vision statement and apply strategies to time management in your profession
- Develop and apply strategies for goal setting and task prioritization around various professional roles
- Develop a technology and energy management plan for use in professional environments
Career opportunities with a BAAS Cybersecurity degree include:
- Cybersecurity Technician
- IT Security Support Specialist
- Network Security Assistant
- Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Technician
- Cybersecurity Technician
- IT Security Support Specialist
- Network Security Assistant
- Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) Technician
Also available:
Lamar University offers a range of online BAAS degree programs in high-growth professional fields, each built around a distinct emphasis area.
*Price includes distance learning fee.
Tuition
Learn about tuition for the cybersecurity BAAS program
The following is the tuition breakdown for students pursuing the BAAS – Emphasis in Cybersecurity online program. Our affordable, pay-by-the-course tuition helps you keep your education costs in check.
| Program | Per Credit Hour | Per Course |
|---|---|---|
| BAAS – Cybersecurity Emphasis | $314 | $942 |
*University fees are included in the tuition listed. University fees can be covered by Financial Aid if you choose to apply and are qualified for aid.
Tuition and fees are subject to change without notice due to action by the Board of Regents or The Texas State Legislature.
Total program cost depends upon transfer hours and program advisement relevant to program requirements. For more information, contact a Lamar University enrollment specialist.
Financial Aid
Ready to get started on your degree program online but need help finding ways to fund your education? We can help you discover student financing sources that include grants, loans and other payment options. Learn more about financial aid here.
Tuition breakdown:
Calendar
Discover program start dates and deadlines
Our BAAS Cybersecurity undergraduate degree program features multiple start dates to accommodate your busy schedule. Choose the application deadline that works best for you and begin earning your degree any time of year.
| 8 week courses | Program Start Date | Application Deadline | Document Deadline | Payment Due | Last Class Day |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fall 1 | 8/18/26 | 7/28/26 | 8/4/26 | 8/11/26 | 10/9/26 |
| Fall 1 | 10/12/26 | 9/21/26 | 9/28/26 | 10/6/26 | 12/10/26 |
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Admissions
Review admission guidelines for the BAAS Cybersecurity undergraduate degree
The BAAS Cybersecurity program has specific requirements that applicants must meet to enroll. Please read the admission guidelines carefully to ensure you qualify.
Admission Requirements:
- AAS Degree in Cybersecurity
- Official Transcripts
University Admission Requirements
All applicants must complete an application packet, consisting of:
- Complete online application and pay an application fee of $25
- Submit official transcripts from all high schools, colleges and universities you have attended
- All transcripts are required regardless of accreditation. Only regionally accredited institutions will be eligible for transfer credit.
- Verify specific requirements associated with chosen degree program
BAAS – Emphasis in Cybersecurity Admission Requirements
- Completed AAS degree from a regionally accredited community college, with a major in cybersecurity
- Proficiency in programming, demonstrated through programming courses completed for the AAS degree (grade of B or higher required)
If you have not completed previous programming courses or do not meet the programming grade requirement, you must complete UNIX/C++ (COSC 3306) with a grade of B or higher before enrolling in other Cybersecurity BAAS courses.
Courses
Explore the BAAS curriculum, including cybersecurity courses
The cybersecurity BAAS degree is comprised of 120 hours, including up to 42 hours in AAS transfer credit, 33 hours in emphasis-area classes and general education coursework needed to meet bachelor's degree requirements.
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Apply appropriate C++ programming techniques to design project
- Solve real-world problem using C++ programming language
- Compare and evaluate the effectiveness of various programming techniques
This course does not need computer programming. There are six main objectives of this course:
- Give an introduction to the ethical style of good writing in computer science
- Present the social, legal, philosophical and economic business issues related to computers that members of a technological society might face in their professional and civic lives
- To discuss copyright laws/issues and business model ethical acquisition and use of digital information, citing sources using established methods
- Describe proper business etiquette and knowledge of acceptable use policies when using networks, especially resources on the internet and intranet
- Discuss measures, such as passwords or virus detection/prevention, to protect computer systems and databases from unauthorized use and tampering
- Describe the impact of computer programming on the World Wide Web (WWW) community
By the end of this course, students should be able to:
- Demonstrate understanding of the fundamental principles and concepts of software engineering
- Applying appropriate software engineering principles in software development
- Illustrate confidence in object-oriented programming, based software design
- Applying software quality assurance concepts in the development process
- Demonstrate the skills required to work in a team to develop a software system
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Examine software programs to determine software security threats
- Apply defensive programming strategies and modify object-oriented software code to eliminate software security threats
- Design the proper documentation of previous security breaches in the software system
- Demonstrate the secure software mindset by recognizing risks, threats and defenses in real-world context.
- Design and build secure software systems by applying vulnerability identification and mitigation techniques
- Ensure software reliability through effective testing, validation and error-handling procedures
- Enhance program understandability by producing maintainable, modular code and clear documentation
- Identify and correct common programmer misconceptions that lead to insecure systems
- Perform offensive security assessments, including vulnerability scanning, malware defense and CVSS scoring, to evaluate software resilience
- Apply ethical, compliant and professional practices, demonstrating teamwork and awareness of the societal impact of secure software engineering
After the completion of this course, students should be able to:
- Apply both uninformed and informed search algorithms to solve complex problems and optimize search efficiency
- Utilize formal logic and constraint satisfaction methods to model and solve AI problems, ensuring sound reasoning in decision-making processes
- Implement probabilistic reasoning techniques to manage uncertainty and make informed predictions.
- Analyze and apply decision theory, Markov Decision Process and Hidden Markov Model to develop AI agents capable of making optimal decisions under uncertainty
- Design and evaluate reinforcement learning algorithms to enable agents to learn optimal policies through interaction with their environment
- Demonstrate skills for implementing AI-based solutions in groups
Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:
- Describe the nature of threats and vulnerabilities in most software, networks, systems, websites and applications
- Explain a network intrusion, breach or attack, and then design methods for its secure protocol
- Secure systems that are not vulnerable to application program attack, such as a buffer overflow attack
- Construct websites that are not vulnerable to attack, such as XSS attacks or SQL injection attacks
- Know cryptography techniques, such as RSA and MAC
- Infer the vulnerabilities in emerging technologies
Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:
- Explain how the internet works
- Describe and generalize various network vulnerabilities
- Simulate common attacks on TCP/IP, such as IP spoofing and TCP session hijacking
- Simulate and compare various network security mechanisms, such as firewalls and VPNs
By the end of this course, students will understand:
- Master fundamental concepts of operating systems, such as device management, process management, memory management and file management
- Device drivers and I/O management, such as polling and interrupt-driven I/O operations
- Process management, such as abstract machines, address space, context switch, process, thread, state transition diagram and resource models
- Memory management such as virtual memory, segmentation, paging and swapping
- File management, such as basic read and write file operations
- CPU scheduling, such as design and implementation of scheduler, preemptive scheduling policies and non-preemptive scheduling policies
- Basic and high-level synchronization principles, such as critical section, deadlock, binary semaphore, general semaphore, readers–writers problem, bounded–buffer problem, dining philosophersproblem, monitor, conditional variable, signals and basic inter-process communication
- How to develop corresponding programs using Unix system calls, such as fork(), signal(), pthread_create(), fopen(), sleep(), sem_ init() and wait()
- How to analyze software development problems, design and implement software solutions, and write technical reports. There will be a term project, in which a complex problem will be analyzed, designed, implemented and documented.
Students who successfully complete this course will be able to:
- Identify, install and evaluate software for Android using the Java programming language
- Create interactive Android applications using layouts, buttons and preferences
- Create interactive Android applications that draw 2D graphics on a full-screen view
- Create Android applications that launch other applications and access the internet
- Demonstrate an understanding of new technological developments in Android
The student who successfully completes the course will be able to:
- Understand the design and implementation of a working database system for a real-world project
- Understand structured query language for query and manipulation of data as well as formaintaining the integrity of stored data in a database
- Apply mathematical and theoretical underpinnings of database systems
- Investigate the major operational issues associated with database management systems, such as issues related to database design and queries
- Create a brief technical report or presentation of selected research areas of database management systems
Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:
- Implement machine learning algorithms like linear regression, logistic regression, decision trees and support vector machines to solve real-world problems across diverse domains
- Use evaluation metrics (e.g., accuracy, precision, recall, F1-score) to assess the effectiveness and suitability of machine learning models for specific applications.
- Implement unsupervised learning techniques by applying k-means clustering and principal component analysis (PCA) for pattern recognition, anomaly detection and dimensionality reduction in large data sets
- Design and implement deep learning models (e.g., neural networks, CNNs, RNNs) for complex applications like image recognition, NLP and time-series forecasting
- Integrate and utilize data preprocessing techniques, such as feature engineering, data cleaning and normalization to optimize data for machine learning algorithms
- Work in teams to collaborate and complete machine learning projects, demonstrating skills in problem-solving, model implementation and performance evaluation
- Evaluate model interpretability and ensure the explainability of machine learning models, particularly in sensitive domains like healthcare and finance
- Utilize machine learning methods to address real-world challenges in healthcare, chemistry, autonomous vehicles and cybersecurity.
- Use advanced machine learning methods like reinforcement learning, adversarial learning and probabilistic modeling to solve complex problems across multiple sectors
- Actively attend and listen to research paper presentations by master's students to engage with advanced applications of machine learning, cutting-edge software development techniques and emerging technologies in the field. Engage critically by asking questions to further understand advanced methods that can inform and enrich their own work.
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Demonstrate successful Installation of a Linux system server and setup services
- Perform various tasks in order to maintain network services, protocols and processes in a Linux environment
- Configure multiple types of applications, servers and services
At the conclusion of this course, students will be able to:
- Master fundamental concepts of computer networks and their applications: OSI layers, Telnet, Secure Shell and WWW
- Understand socket programming and develop basic network protocol software and algorithms, such as socket(), bind(), listen(), accept(), send() and recv()
- Understand OSI model layers: – physical layer, data link layer, network layer, transport layer and application layer
- Understand fundamentals of data transmission
- Understand Local Area Networks (LANs) and data link protocols: Carried Sense Multiple Access (CSMA)/collision detection, 802.3 and the Spanning Tree Algorithm
- Understand internet working, IP, TCP and UDP: packet format, IP address, IP packet forwarding, IP encapsulation, fragmentation and reassembly, CIDR, port, TCP flow control and TCP congestion control
- Understand routing: Distance Vector Routing, Link State Routing, RIP, OSPF and BGP
- Understand client-server interaction
- Understand high-level network services: DNS, FTP, HTTP and SMNP
- Understand the basic concepts of network security, secret key, public/private key and hashing
- Perform simulation of network protocols: metric to evaluate protocol performance and simulation of networking protocols
- Understand ethical issues of computer networks: hacking and computer crimes, identity theft, anonymity, intellectual property, censorship, related laws and related cases
Upon successful completion of this course, the student will be able to:
- Identify the principles of cellular, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, sensor and ad-hoc networking
- Explain the impact of wireless network characteristics on existing network protocols in IoT
- Apply network design principles to new protocols that are suited to the characteristics of different IoT applications
Communication - 6 Hours
Mathematics - 3 Hours
Life and Physical Sciences - 6 Hours
Language, Philosophy and Culture - 3 Hours
Creative Arts - 3 Hours
American History - 6 Hours
Government/Political Science - 6 Hours
Social/Behavioral Sciences - 3 Hours
Component Area Options - 6 Hours
42 hours of technical or academic credit taken as part of completed AAS degree.
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