Granted its helpful that an engineer know how to use all the equipment, but there are a couple of reasons we don't always. First, we have technicians, often from colleges (and nothing wrong with this at all) to whom a major portion of their schooling was very practically based, and thus are hired to use the equipment for us. Secondly our training is not designed specifically to know how to use a hundred and one pieces of equipment (though presumably you pick up a few

, rather it teaches us the more fundemental abstract aspects of things, not always the purely practical. So the engineer might not be able to use the oscilliscope, but perhaps he/she knows the detailed inner workings of how its built, and fundementally why it works, likely something college level courses don't teach. Learning how to use a piece of equipment is relatively simple, learning how to use a piece exceedingly well is not, and neither University or College will teach you this, experience does, in fact you'll learn more from experience then you will from any degree. For an engineering degree you learn how to learn, and you learn how to think and for the "things" you learn, they tend to be at a more abstract and fundemental level. I'm a Master Degreed Materials Engineer from Canada, and I've reviewed college level curriculum and they're certainly are not the same as University. While we can get in a pissing contest over...but my school taught me this and his didn't blah blah, the reality is, in almost every circumstance I know (in Canada anyways), engineers tend to hold the more techinically challenging and usually higher salaried jobs. That's not to say college people don't, many do, but were we to stereotype, it would be in favour of engineers. I can only assume there's some reason for this, or then again, maybe everyone's got the wool pulled over their eyes and we all wasted our money....or perhaps maybe not

Each education has it's place and value, and both are worthwhile (in fact more people should probably go to college), but they aren't the same.
Cheers,
Solace