Nothing special as far as getting paid.. like $1300 a month plus your tuition. Problem is, until the deficiencies are made up, it's all out of pocket.
As far as a degree and no prospects, that's kinda where I thought I was right now.
Here's a post where I list some of what I've tried for -
http://forums.anandtech.com/showpost.php?p=36767804&postcount=95
I search indeed every day, maybe I just don't know what to search for.
I'm about to apply to the "Electronics Test Technician" here and that's about my last hope-
http://www.apei.net/about/career/
Edit instead of bumping: I've basically been doing nothing relevant to anything for the last 5+ years, which certainly isn't helping the job search. I thought school would be a good way to refresh my resume.
So first, as some others have recommended, the MSEE is a good idea. One of the big reasons I say that is breadth of opportunity. The EE degree has like 5000 specializations (ok ok, maybe 7-8) and you will find EEs working in practically anything, power utilities, wireless networks, toy manufacturing, hell one of my friends from grad school ended up as an analyst at Goldmann Sachs (econometric models are fundamentally identical to engineering ones, but engineers are generally much better programmers =)
The secret is that while in school you pick a specialty to study for which makes you knowledgeable in some smaller field, HR departments don't particularly care what specialization (I've never included it on my resume), they just have a checkbox for relevant degrees and MS EE fills that box for a huge number of positions. And getting past that first HR hurdle is often more than half the battle. This is why I specialized in machine intelligence and data mining, but now design LTE modems.
As for the prereqs - talk to the school, it may be possible to take those through an extensions program, where you pay a lot less. Even if not, having a BS Physics you may be to wrangle a position as a TA in the Physics Dept. while you make up the work for the engineering. Also, even if officially you don't qualify for an RA position in the engineering dept. it's worth talking with Professors, to them some silly course prereq is not nearly as important as having useful knowledge and ability in physics, they may be able to make an end-run around the requirements.
Also, you're completely right on the networking. Every position I have held has come through the grapevine. Got to know a prof. as an undergrad, he put me onto a consulting research opportunity with a company, my contacts there got me a position with a neuroscience group, which got me paid through grad school. My PhD advisor was neighbors with a director at a major tech firm and needed an intern, which led to meeting my future boss who pointed me to an application for comm. engineer position (but he wanted a guy who knew non-linear adaptive filtering which is what machine intelligence is all about.)
So even if you have to take some student loans to get through the make-up courses, if you're putting yourself in a position to get to know professors and other grad students, building contacts and generally getting yourself in the loop - that's worth it.
But you have to be doing that, you have to go to professor office hours and have a few minutes talk about the industry, you have to find out about meetings and groups going on that discuss topics relevant to your desired job fields (for instance I was part of a group that met weekly to review papers in computational statistics, met a lot of great contacts, and by giving presentations to the group was able to not only improve my skills in public speaking, but also get my abilities seen) Especially since a lot of times interested people from industry come to those meetings to keep up to date on research, and also keep an eye out for intern material.