Long ago (in the early 2000s), I was contracted to create FPGA Development boards for my University. The existing FPGA boards on the market were just crammed full of crap, which made for an unintuitive excursion to find "free" pins for doing logic exercises in the lab.
Knowing that these would be abused by students, I had to come up with every possible route I could think of to damage these things. A few items of what I wound up determining:
1. No matter what, use linear regulators. In the worst case, the things get hot and their internal shutdown takes over. (Failsafe) - Switchers had a tendancy to overshoot their target regulation voltage and destroy the FPGA.
2. Anything that the students might touch, needed protection. All of the I/O had 330 ohm series resistors.
3. Someone will eventually burn out the primary path for an important signal, put down alternates and backups.
In the end, these boards were in service for six years, and only went into retirement because the software went obsolete/unsupported. Out of the 28 pc build, there were only two catastrophic/unsalvagable failures in that time- one of them was because a student couldn't locate the wall wart included with the unit, and just "hot wired" line voltage into the thing.
PhDs and Masters degrees mean diddily when it comes to the "practical." This same Uni, had a PhD student-in-progress who decided to take some measurements with a VNA and couldn't figure out what the APC-7 connectors were. In his brilliance, because hey "I'm a PhD student, therefore I'm smart!" he decided to solder an SMA connector onto these connectors. After he was reprimanded, all of the "expensive" gear was locked away into professors' labs and only accessible through obtaining permission and getting grilled on whether you know wtf you're doing or not.
Is then comes as no surprise that the very bottom-barrel test gear by Rigol (or anyone else, really) disintegrates in the School setting. Many of these students approach an instrument like it were spaghetti being thrown to the wall to find out what sticks.