Undergraduate and Graduate School Trends
Universities that offer undergraduate and graduate coursework in biomedical engineering
reported that the interest in their programs is on the rise. Most reported a 20 to 50 percent
increase in the student population from 1991 to 2001. Nearly all of these programs have
staff sizes of fewer than 10 people. Only a few reported having a staff of more than 25
members. (See Figure 66-9.) Two-thirds of these universities reported that the quality of
entering students is better today than it was in 1991. (See Figure 66-10.)
The focus of study at US undergraduate and graduate clinical engineering programs is
equally split between electrical engineering and computer science (see Figure 66-8); the
latter group includes computerized medical instrumentation, telemetry, web-enabled
devices, database management, LAN devices, and general information technology. The
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill devotes nearly 70 percent of its curriculum to
computer science.