With products from a vendor like Thor Labs, you're getting a lot of quality and knowledge built into the system. Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, optical engineers... all of which means an edu kit like that will train a student to be useful in most grad research labs (which often build their systems out of thor labs components).

It sort of depends on what your goal is; personally, I live to see something expensive on Thorlabs, and make a simplified, less accurate, and far cheaper alternative in my home lab. But that's rarely how folks in labs do it- instead, they will focus on getting people to be useful for performing state of the art research, which usually depends on applying hundreds of years of experience to make some tiny marginal improvement, which frequently depends on having extremely precise and accurate gear.

Ironic isn't it, since Thorlabs brought down the cost of optical tooling and made components more accessible - they are the Amazon of optics and remain a cost leader.

I was a teaching assistant for freshman physics lab while in grad school, almost 40 years ago. My co-teachers were all theoreticians, so I bore the brunt of helping the students troubleshoot their setups.

There's a balance that has to be struck between: 1) Equipment that's so perfect that students learn nothing about the effort to get an experiment working. 2) Or so crappy that it's an obstacle to learning anything at all.

Also, the crappy-ness is multiplied by 30 for the number of setups needed for a class of 60 students, assuming they work in pairs.

Oh, the crappy oscilloscopes. They were cheap "student scopes" and their controls were worn out, so they behaved erratically. Since then I've met other people who took freshman physics lab, and they remember the "oscilloscope lab" with disgust.

ha, thanks!

that one has uhh substantially less drift for what it's worth, but reprinting in more stable material would help that a ton (and still be quite cheap!)