A few years ago, Scott Thompson, CEO of Yahoo, was let go because he claimed to have graduated with a Computer Science degree in a year before the college even offered a Computer Science degree.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/business/the-undoing-of-scott-thompson-at-yahoo-common-sense.html
Virginia Tech in the article you quote is mistaken or the newspaper that quoted Virginia Tech is mistaken. It was not until around late 1987 or so that Virginia started offering a Computer Engineering degree which is about the time that the Bradley Department of Electrical Engineering was renamed the Bradley Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. Degrees from this department in 1984 were named "Electrical Engineering." Please see
https://ece.vt.edu/about/endowment about how the department was renamed to include Computer Engineering in 1987. Virginia Tech's commencement program and course catalog from 1984 have no degrees in Computer Engineering in the Electrical Engineering department. Now they have two degrees in the department - EE and CPE - but they did not at the time in 1984.
If Turpin returned to Virginia Tech after the 1987 Computer Engineering degree was started or completed one recently, that is possible, but it is not possible that he graduated in 1984 with a Computer Engineering degree because that degree did not yet exist. He could have taken Computer Science courses though, but he didn't graduate from the Computer Science program and in 1984 there were no B.S. degrees in Computer Engineering.