This paper reports on a quantitative analysis of the informational significance of SWEBOK knowledge
areas in the curriculum guidelines developed as IEEE/ACM recommendations for educational programs in
software engineering. The analysis uses a representation of the hierarchical structure of educational content
in the form of an oriented bipartite hypergraph. The out-degrees of the vertices of the graph transitive
closure are selected as the quantitative characteristics of the studied topics, reflecting their mutual
influence within educational programs. A feature of the computational algorithm is the representation of
the transitive closure matrix in the form of a sparse matrix of a block structure, the nonzero blocks of
which have a significantly lower dimension. The graph approach to quantitative analysis of SWEBOK
knowledge areas, is a novel approach to curricular analytics: it is not limited to the software engineering
example presented and may be useful for the development of an evidence-based educational policy.