A call for change.

In the BMET field, higher education deserves a failing grade. Institutions are not producing enough graduates to meet the needs of employers. The accreditation process is a disaster and we have extremes in the characteristics of programs and educators. BMET higher education varies from unaccredited technical schools to Big 10 universities. At several large BMET academic programs, instructors are required to have doctorates, but at others, an associate degree is satisfactory. And, for BMETs in the field, educational background variations are extreme. Thirty years ago biomedical engineering (BME) academic programs had similar issues: a handful of programs, an unknown major, and few educators willing to blend engineering and life sciences. Then the Whitaker Foundation was formed to expand the “research and design” branch of the field. Undergraduate programs blossomed and states embraced BME as the foundation of the future economy. Now, the widely recognized field is supported by more than 100 academic institutions. A nice result for BME, but this exacerbated the confusion surrounding the clinical area of practice. Although many people often refer to our field as Biomedical Engineering, there are a wide variety of hospital department names (e.g., clinical engineering, medical engineering) and no standardized job titles. Without a consistent name, one might look to the academic accreditation process to promote a predictable set of educational objectives and nomenclature. ABET (www.abet.org) evaluates educational programs, yet it struggles to serve our field. A professional society is designated to partner with ABET for each major; the Biomedical Engineering Society (BMES, www.bmes. org) oversees biomedical engineering.Visit the BMES website and examine the definition of Biomedical Engineering and you will see the disconnect. Only a few programs are ABET accredited and the educational representative to BMES is a busy academic dean from a school that does not offer a biomedical engineering technology degree. Many hours at many conferences have been spent discussing solutions to this educational crisis. To find a solution, we should examine successful models. To unify higher education in this field, a foundation, similar to the Whitaker Foundation, must be established by corporations and organizations struggling to find employees. The foundation could work with employers and educational institutions to generate educational objectives and fund the creation of new degree-granting programs to meet those goals. The foundation would work to partner a better matched professional society with ABET and actively engage faculty in the assessment process. This newly formed group would act in the same way the Whitaker Foundation did to make dramatic, national strides in recognition and career awareness. This is not a simple solution. However, most people who hire in this field will express their desperate need for a dramatic change. It is extremely unlikely that educational institutions will respond independently. But the tremendous desire to protect patient safety, promote effective treatments, and serve the medical staff will push efforts to end this dire situation.