Can you imagine a raspberry pi for every student where you just buy a new microSD card for each class and all notes/assignments are stored in the cloud or a gitlab type site for higher-education? That way it's a snap to set up with the exact development environment you need and if you mess something up badly, the T.A. could re-image your sd card and you just grab your assignments from your git.

Indeed there seem few disciplines where you really need much equipment for bachelor's degree study. Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.

> Even in science where it's nice to be able to do stuff in labs, really you can learn pretty much all of it from books.

I think most life/physical sciences mandate a lab requirement. I think you can learn the facts from books, but if you want a job in those fields after you graduate with a bachelor's, you'll be spending most of your time in a lab.

"A couple of months in the laboratory can frequently save a couple hours in the library." - Frank Westheimer

That is, if you don't know what's in the books, you can waste a huge amount of time re-discovering it in the laboratory...

That is only if you're doing stuff on the cutting edge of basic science.

What you learn in lab classes in college is what's important in most industry and academia. Being careful of cross contamination, religiously keeping up your lab notebook, being able to troubleshoot experiments, keeping things documented and repeatable. That's 99.9% of industry research, not coming up with new reactions or processes.

At my university they gave is all a free hundred dollars worth of aws creds for our parallel course - who needs clusters?