For the PA residents, what is wrong with Pitt engineering? Temple? Penn State is the flagship, main campus, but there are ABET accredited programs at other campuses too. If there is an ABET accredited program,. all the standard engineering requirements are offered. Start here http://main.abet.org/aps/accreditedprogramsearch.aspx
There is no ABET accredited engineering program that will not get you an engineering job.
And if engineering yields a 70K a year income out of school, I think 20K debt is servicable, maybe more.
And as far as CC goes, even engineering has 2 years of fairly basic classes that should be offered. Let’s exclude AP credits, since the goal is to enter a 4 year school at the junior level with only the required classes, so AP or CC are functionally equivalent. Let’s say you are still missing one or two sophomore classes, can’t you go to the 4 year school for summer class or even 3 years?
Let’s also face the fact that engineering in 4 years is pretty challenging and that many people either take longer or leave the major all together. So the outcome of a motivated CCer taking prerequisites and some interesting offerings at CC, then evaluating their GPA and interests and transferring … it’s really not a bad option, unless you are a top 10 or 20% student, in which case there are places you can go … or you can just suck it up, get As while working at Walmart and making yes $8K a year which adds up to a good pile of cash, and then using those savings to help pay room at board somewhere.
Finally - it’s all about voting - I also am shocked at how high some states have priced their schools - but these are often states where taxes were capped years ago (NJ) or likely where taxpayers supported really severe cutbacks in state services.