Cisco is to spend $10m on infosec scholarships to 'widen talent pool'

Does that come with a guaranteed job?

The problem is not having enough smart people; the problem is having enough smart people who see a future in the IT world. Students aren't dumb, and there are very few dedicated (crazy?) people these days who study in fields that don't have an immediate ROI (at least here in the US.)

If you want to train the "next generation of cyberwarriors" or whatever, you need to provide enough entry level jobs that these students can graduate into. You then have to have a progression of roles, leading to higher salaries and more interesting work over time, to keep people in the field. Offshoring and outsourcing have destroyed entry-level IT and the informal apprenticeship system that people in my generation went through. (By this, I mean graduating from help desk to in-person support to data center monkey to junior sysadmin and so on.) Those entry level jobs in the US are most likely filled by close-to-minimum wage body shop employees or H-1B visa holders these days.

If I were a very smart student now, I'd be targeting professions that cannot be offshored such as medicine or high-end consulting. Doctors in the US have it made once they're licensed; they were smart and set up a system that prevents oversupply, lobbies against legislation that would lower their pay and regulates practice. We in IT-land could learn a lot from them.