Prospective students must really do their due diligence before getting into a security studies program. Quite a few of the older generation of security scholars simply do not understand the 21st century threat environment. Additionally, if the program you are looking at is in a department where only formal international political economy (IPE) is taught—that is, such studies never touch upon the informal or illicit economies—your education is going to be imperiled by delusional thinking. To have an actual impact upon the future, young security scholars need to learn about the world that actually exists today and not the one that existed decades ago.
