Education: Equipment shortfall in EE labs: Undergraduate schools for the most part have substandard, obsolete equipment and it's in short supply, too

Hunched over test instruments in a laboratory, with a scientific calculator within reach, undergraduates at the University of Colorado School of Engineering are a picture of rapt learning. But there is something wrong with the picture. The students are studying modern integrated-circuit technology, but the school's test instruments — a signal generator, an oscilloscope, an impedance bridge — are all vacuum-tube relics from the late 1950s. The calculator is new, but it is not school property; it belongs to one of the students.