I recently graduated from Thomas Edison with their BS in Nuclear Engineering Technology. While not exactly a very usefull degree since I live 500 miles from the nearest plant, it served many purposes. First of all, I started the program in 2000 while still in the Navy. They gave me over 90+ semester hours of credit, between A school, power school, prototype, making E-5, plus some course work I had taken elsewhere. While not exactly the degree I wanted, it was quick and easy to finish, mainly some general ed courses. It was cheap, too, even before throwing in GI Bill paying for it.
The program *is* ABET accredited, but as the previous post mentioned, you cannot take the Fundamentals of Engineering exam with an eng. tech degree in most states. Fortunately for me, Colorado is one of the few states in which the degree qualifies one to sit for the FE exam, so if I choose to I can start down the path to being a PE.
Another benefit is that a degree in any technical discipline is good for many other jobs, including STA slots at nuke plants, any type of facilities supervisor position, and gives you 12 months of junior HP credit, which was my motivation for finishing it.
However, my nuclear career appears to be over for a while because I was denied unescorted access at Catawba a few weeks ago and got sent home (which pretty much sucked). So now, the biggest benefit to having the TESC degree was that it enabled me to get admitted to graduate school so I can step back from radiation protection and pursue the bigger picture of that which RP is a subset of, namely the broad arena of industrial hygiene and environmental health and safety.
So, it just depends on what your goals are. I highly encourage all current Navy nukes to spend some free time taking general ed CLEP and DANTES exams while they're free, and then get the TESC or Excelsior Nuc. Eng. Tech degree just for the sake of having a degree, then go from there with whatever additional education they may desire. Once you have a first BS, a second one in a different field or a graduate degree is much closer at hand.
Toodles!
JassenB