Why Do We Share Oscilloscopes But Buy Textbooks?

Students should have access to their own measurement instruments rather than sharing equipment, especially in universities with higher tuition costs. We need to buy a secondhand iClicker and textbooks for each class, but we have to share the lab's $2000 oscilloscope when a personal one costs just $200.

Another point of owning our instruments is that we can grow into it. Even after a semester of lab classes, the oscilloscopes, spectrum analyzers still feel foreign to me. As I am fortunate to own my own equipment, I have seen myself grown into them. My dad bought me an oscilloscope, logic analyzer, and didn't teach me very much how to use it. But as I carry it around with me, I would think about it in the back of my mind and see if it can solve my current problem in my projects. 2 years after I got it, I remembered it, "don't my oscilloscope have a logic analyzer function?". And it was very instrumental in the debugging of my project. Similarly, my $400 Owon 3-in-1 oscilloscope was the same story. At the start, I used it mainly as a multimeter, but as my projects grew, I use it as an oscilloscope more than a multimeter now.

I think forcing students to buy the measurement equipment when the equipment are a low hundreds of dollars coincide very well with the reasoning of enforcement of iClickers. I do think iClickers should be included in tuition, but ignoring that topic, I think an oscilloscope and student's own makeshift lab should be prioritized over iClickers and textbooks. iClickers can just be replaced with thumbs up/down voting in class, and lectures can be the textbook itself. On the other hand, an oscilloscope can only be replaced with a simulation of one in our mind, detaching our understanding from reality. The only corrections to our "simulation in our mind" are 3-hour lab sessions and test scores. I think it is obvious that correcting our understanding with test scores is too slow. And although we need lab sessions to teach and test scores to incentivize, we also need students to own their own instrument. In that way, they can gain their sixth sense into voltages and currents instead of relying on descriptions through textbooks, questions, and answers.

As a modern society, we are gifted with accessible oscilloscopes for ~$200. And if we drive up demand for a very productive need for oscilloscopes, it will get even a bit cheaper. We are in the post-industrial age, but our classrooms have shared oscilloscopes, breadboards, and ICs. Why?