More than the quantum of the expense, I am questioning the need. Couple of hundred dollars on an unnecessary expense is still wastage.
In Swedish engineering schools, graphing calculators are banned from exams in almost all subject.
The only time I remember needing a calculator in my entire education was some circuit theory because those Thevenins and Nortons get real ugly real fast (but even then you only need +,-,*,/)
Edit: Ok, I remember now there was a statistics exam when we had something like Student's t-distribution tabulated on the exam sheet but I had to scrape my brain to find an example, it does happen though
I’m not asking about calculus classes. You specifically said “my entire education”
So you never needed to convert log(17) to decimal in your entire education? Or you just converted it by hand like the Neanderthals did?
Of course I had to at some point but in those instances I was at a computer anyway so I just used excel/python/matlab what have you, not a calculator like a Neanderthal