I am about halfway through my electronics program at school and would like to get into robotics. Can anyone recommend a good expandable robotics kit that is also programmable?  I am good at soldering and circuits so they can be fairly advanced kits. My budget is about $250 to $500. Any help is appreciated.

What level of schooling?

Lego Mindstorm is actually a very good start in that area. Look for a high school doing a First Robotics competition would be another method.

I am a junior at Herzing University about a year away from my second Bachelors degree. The lego stuff is cool but I want something more advanced.

Well I would highly recommend First (www.usfirst.org) them, as a mentor you get to play with equipment that far exceeds the budget you have mentioned. If that wouldn't work out for you I would suggest focus on learning the small processors Atmel, PIC, etc and build up a robot architecture that has those processors doing your IO and using a standard laptop for your big brain. I don't think that there are any robots kits that will expand over the Mindstorm in a significant way for that price point.

What type of robotics are you trying to get into? If industrial you might want to look into learning plc programming.

societyofrobots.com

http://www.geckodrive.com/

The maker of these inexpensive drives also makes programmable (FPGA) multi-axis controller boards for the PC.  If you really want to dive into the world of robotics, this is a good start for sophisticated hardware.  C++ is another thing you should be learning.

This hardware is used by the motion picture industry for animatronics.  I worked with a 21 axis microstepping controller from this source in an industrial automation project.  I did the hardware, wiring, schematics, thermal testing, and high speed motion analysis on this one. I am not a programmer....

I should add this  will have you soldering resistors, headers, voltage regulators and everything else onto a circuit board.