Bioengineering programs will need to make choices about a number of things:

• The content they provide, since there is not time to cover everything
  
  
• The extent to which students have a common curriculum
  
  
  • Should there be a completely prescribed set of courses?
    
  • Should there be a large set of core courses with a few to be chosen from a menu?
    
  • Should there be a small set of core courses with extensive choices via tracks?
    
    
• The relative focus on theory vs. practice
  
  
• The extent to which they prepare students for existing industries vs. emerging ones
  
  
• The relative effort to expend on undergraduate vs. graduate education

Other academic communities have also addressed the issues that occur in planning curricula. An excellent example can be found in the work done by the Joint IEEE Computer Society/ACM Task Force on the "Model Curricula for Computing":

We believe that an important goal should be to produce adaptive experts. Graduates may change jobs several times and have to respond to new technologies and new situations.

We believe that there is a set of core competencies, i.e., professional skills, that are necessary for all bioengineers to learn and master. The top level categories of the core competencies are shown below. These are as important to undergraduate engineers as the content knowledge represented in domain taxonomies, because the core competencies will be applicable for bioengineers independent of the career paths they follow.