A survey and analysis of electrical engineering curricula in communications and signal processing

How does one accomplish the task of obtaining and analyzing data in order to describe current trends in a certain segment of electrical engineering education? A year ago, when asked by the Editor of the IEEE Communications Magaine if we thought that the results of such an endeavor dealing with communications and signal processing would be of value to electrical engineering faculty and working communications engineers alike, we struggled with this question. A year later, at the time of writing of this article, we are still struggling with it! In addition to not being sure of just how to analyze and organize the data, we are swamped with more information from a larger sample of electrical engineering departments than we ever dreamed possible. Given this insight into the past andcurrent start of our naivete, then, the readeris asked to acceptht is article at face value - much data, some analysis, and a few inferences. The outline of the paper is simple. We first overview the general conclusions, trends, and implications gained from the survey. We next describe how we gathered the data and how the sample of electrical engineering departments that was used as a data base evolved. Finally, the data on course offerings, textbooks used, areas of research and special investigations, and numbers of students involved are presented along with some discussion of the meaning of the presentations.