The question here reminds me of the kids in class who ask, "When are we ever going to use this?" It is a little more frequent in high school and below, rather than at the university level and above.
If you look at most first year university courses - specifically in physics (but it applies to math, engineering, and chemistry as well) - you'll likely find that the problems don't actually vary that much from school to school. Some professors will try to get a little more creative and some will just assign problems from the chapters in the text, but because the key concepts are similar, so are the problems. In fact so are the textbooks.
In university, you have to keep in mind that you're learning an academic discipline. Job training, or direct applications specific to given professions - is something that comes at the community college level. When you come out of school with a degree in physics there are certain problems that you would be expected to be able to solve, at least if you're going on to graduate school, so if you look at the programs across a range of schools, they don't really vary that much.
What you're paying the big bucks for at the university level, is to be taught the discipline from someone who is at the leading edge of it. This person's opinion is based on his or her experience in getting to that leading edge and should be quite valuable. But even then, when assigning problems, the decision is largely based on needing the students to have covered specific topics by the end of the term.