"What are tuition fees like at the sort of community colleges which offer part-time vocational programs"
The school I attended didn't really have the concept of "full vs part time" it was solely credit hours with one minor little exception of $7.50 for liability insurance per semester no matter how many or few credits.
Fifteen years ago when I got my near worthless associates it was approx $1000 for 16 credits per semester. Next fall its exactly $1870.40 for the same 16 credits, however there is a MINIMUM material fee and MINIMUM activity fee adding up to at least $176 per class, even if the class involves no materials or activities. Also there is a mandatory liability insurance fee for all students tacked on at the end of the bill (Student has coverage if during carpentry class he drives a nail thru his classmates hand, that type of thing). If you take classes online its an extra $160, apparently its extremely expensive to heat and cool a virtual classroom... or some BS like that. It would be very difficult to escape below $2100 per semester at full time, so lets call it $1050 in the fall of 2012 for half/part time per semester (at 3 semesters per year)
The killer problem is I've never found a corporate employer who cares about AS degrees... considered no different than graduating high school. Perhaps Amazon is the first employer I've ever heard of who cares about a AS degree. My entire career has been about knowing people and no one cared about my AS degree. Now that I've been out in the world for awhile, no one cares about the BS degree I later received, either.
The "electronics telecommunications" AS degree requirements were basically the standard EE curricula minus about 64 credits of liberal arts and electives (the suggested curricula had only one possible elective... Instead of photography or whatever I chose microcontroller programming, crazy me). They had a variety of options where you could transfer into the local public or private engineering school after your AS to get your BSEE degree, basically 64 credits of history/fine arts/writing/foreign language/etc plus a little extra math and science (diffeqs, second semester physics, those are the only two "technical" classes I can remember as requirements).
The school I attended didn't really have the concept of "full vs part time" it was solely credit hours with one minor little exception of $7.50 for liability insurance per semester no matter how many or few credits.
Fifteen years ago when I got my near worthless associates it was approx $1000 for 16 credits per semester. Next fall its exactly $1870.40 for the same 16 credits, however there is a MINIMUM material fee and MINIMUM activity fee adding up to at least $176 per class, even if the class involves no materials or activities. Also there is a mandatory liability insurance fee for all students tacked on at the end of the bill (Student has coverage if during carpentry class he drives a nail thru his classmates hand, that type of thing). If you take classes online its an extra $160, apparently its extremely expensive to heat and cool a virtual classroom... or some BS like that. It would be very difficult to escape below $2100 per semester at full time, so lets call it $1050 in the fall of 2012 for half/part time per semester (at 3 semesters per year)
The killer problem is I've never found a corporate employer who cares about AS degrees... considered no different than graduating high school. Perhaps Amazon is the first employer I've ever heard of who cares about a AS degree. My entire career has been about knowing people and no one cared about my AS degree. Now that I've been out in the world for awhile, no one cares about the BS degree I later received, either.
The "electronics telecommunications" AS degree requirements were basically the standard EE curricula minus about 64 credits of liberal arts and electives (the suggested curricula had only one possible elective... Instead of photography or whatever I chose microcontroller programming, crazy me). They had a variety of options where you could transfer into the local public or private engineering school after your AS to get your BSEE degree, basically 64 credits of history/fine arts/writing/foreign language/etc plus a little extra math and science (diffeqs, second semester physics, those are the only two "technical" classes I can remember as requirements).