Online engineering degrees?

[SolarKat]

Lots of interesting graduate level engineering classes at UMass-Lowell, SolarKat. On a related note, does anyone know if the electronics classes at TESU cost an exorbitant supplies fee just like those at APU?

It's cheaper at TESU, but the objectives are a little different between the BSEE and BSEET. The BSEE builds skills for complex design, whereas the BSEET is more about implementing and testing designs from the EEs. TESU seems to use a lot of software simulation of circuits, vs building them by hand. Quickly skimming boards, they use Arduino and Dragon12...much cheaper. The tradeoff is little exposure to industry faves. Just skimming quickly, if a student has no exposure to electronics beforehand, the TESU program may be pretty light on career prep. For a military electronics person, who has had A and C school training on a lot of the basics, TESU would be a good fit.

Also TESU's math is different...they only require stats, calc 1 & calc 2. Whereas APU/AMU require the full calc sequence (1, 2, 3/multivar, diff equations), plus discrete and an upper level applied probability class. (UML's on-campus EET requires through diffeq, too, yet both TESU and UML are ABET. So I don't know what the actual ABET standards cover. UML's EET actually looks more like APU/AMU's EE.)

As an aside, I just noticed today that SNHU is running an on-campus BSEE. Not ABET, but like APU/AMU, they wouldn't qualify until they have graduates who've completed a portfolio of classes that they can submit for final review/approval. This is interesting to me because, if anyone recalls the big ITT fiasco, SNHU was one of the New England colleges that jumped right in, offering to accept just about any credits from ITT, including their electronics stuff. The Wilmington, MA, ITT had a lot of students head over the border to SNHU to carry on.

UML offers an evening on-campus EET (and MET too, I think), if there's any hope of getting to Lowell for classes. They bought out Middlesex Community College, too, so there's another feeder for the (already competitive and crowded) engineering program.

If you have the chance to zip up to Lowell, BTW, definitely hit their NERVE Center. Holly Yanko's program is a lot of fun to see (and she's just a bubbly bundle of energy who loves sharing robotics, especially with girls). They do open houses fairly regularly, and they always pull out NASA's Valkyrie (since they got 1 of the 4 existing in the whole world). MIT doesn't let their Valkyrie out in public quite as often...stingy beavers.