The rising number and cost of cybersecurity attacks justifies continued strong interest in the National Security Agency (NSA) and Department of Homeland Security (DHS) jointly sponsored program for National Centers of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense (CAE-CD). After briefly outlining the current state of the cybersecurity challenge, this article describes our recent experience in successfully applying for designation as a CAE in 2018 and looks ahead to the considerable program changes in effect with the 2019 CAE-CD application. Those seeking CAE re-designation will be interested to know that there is an estimated 19% increase in required mappings as the previous mandatory Knowledge Units (KU) are replaced with the new foundational + technical core KU path. And, with the creation of a new non-technical path, an institution interested in adding that path will find 35% of the required mapping work will be new.