Crazy career move?

Opinions on: would it be worthwhile to get an electrical engineering degree?

I'll like IT for a while, but it's heavily age-biased against "old people" and by the time you're hitting 35 you're definitely "old" for IT. I don't want to end up forced out because I get too slow and I think I'd rather die than be actively willing to stay ahead of the changing tech curve at that age since I tried to get away from tech for a few years before already.

But it got me thinking: there does not exist a schematic for the tuner portion of my 1942 Capehart Panamuse radio cabinet that I bought from Craigslist. If something is broken in there, short of swapping out every swappable part blindly there's probably nobody who knows a better way to do it.

The schematic might be gone now, but the idea got me thinking: there's nobody who knows how to work on this stuff because it's been succeeded by better-in-every-way integrated circuits and people stopped learning how to work on it. But, it is possible to learn how: the physics are still there. They might even be better now. Just, nobody wants to.

I think that's when I decided what I might do for College: Round 2. I miss learning interesting things (how to do X in SQL Management Studio 2008, or set up mail routing between two Exchange servers, does not count.) I rather enjoy the troubleshooting aspect of working on the old radios and stuff, am decent at soldering, and will probably get better at both with practice. So I was thinking, maybe, I could go for electrical engineering.

UW has an EE program, and I'd do it super-part-time (1-2 classes a semester) and learn about how the radio stuff works. And as I get good at it, I open a business restoring radios. Through the Internet, if I'm any good at it, I could become "the guy" who does that in the country. Or, I find something else awesome and engaging and I go do that. Either way it would be a bit of an upgrade.