Will U of Arkansas buy U of Phoenix?!

Sorry, I didn't mean to make it sound like getting into an Engineering Management program was a super difficult thing to do or one that required the accreditation. Just to say that an Engineering Technology degree is a perfectly fine degree for a career in "Engineering" (broad sense) and is unlikely to hold you back or relegate you permanently to a lower tier in terms of scope of work and salary. There are Physical Therapists whose highest degree is a bachelors who were licensed before the Masters became the norm. And today you can earn a bachelors in PT Assistant. Two people with the same level of degree but miles apart in terms of earnings because of where you fell along the degree inflation line graph.

Engineering is much hazier was my point. And if you added a degree in Engineering Management it is quite possible to work your way into some decent management level positions without even thinking about PE.

Part of it is also that there are so many related fields where a STEM degree can be swapped in very easily. Work in IT? They'll take you with an engineering (or engineering tech) degree if you have the skills. Our entire Data Science team are all engineers by training. And while one of our Project Management managers is referred to generally as "an engineer by training" his degree being in engineering tech hasn't affected any of that.

Are there paths, as you note, that will be a dead end? Yes, absolutely. If you are an Engineering Tech assigned to a team of Electrical Engineers, it's highly unlikely you're going to ever take over that team as a Tech. However, could you parlay that experience to become a manager of an engineering or engineering adjacent department? Sure. That isn't specific to engineering. That's just careers in general. An RN will never become Chief of Cardiothoracic Surgery at a hospital. But they have MANY options for leadership beyond just becoming a unit nurse or, eventually, Director of Nursing. The paths are not as linear as they once were. And, for senior level techs, the work they are doing can sometimes be indistinguishable from what an engineer is working on.

All of this to say...the degree, and its accreditation, has some strong potential value for Arkansas and I could see why this would potentially be such an attractive thing for them. Is it a substitute for an engineering degree? No. It was never intended to be. In fact, the whole thing made a lot more sense when Engineering Tech topped out at the associates level and more education meant a degree in engineering (it is pretty common to find engineers today who "worked their way up" to have that degree stack). But it's certainly a viable career path, one we have every bit the difficulty filling as non-specialized engineers and I have to imagine Arkansas is probably not too hard on the eyes on a resume.