None of above. All the kids at our suburban high school use Macbooks. In fact they sometimes bring them to school because the school-issued chromebooks are mediocre.

Seriously I would highly recommend you bite the bullet even if you can only afford the lowest priced Macbook Air. They will last for years (mine is going on 8 years now, as did my prior one) unless used for heavy gaming or other processor-intensive tasks. They are durable even when dropped - in fact I stopped buying the extended support because the only time I need maintenance is to replace the battery. They quickly and easily connect to all networks and printers unlike Dell, Lenovo etc. which in some cases require tech support and/or wired connection and/or google cloud print.

Remember you get what you pay for. I love costco but the low end laptops are junk, even if you are only connecting to internet. In fact the school-issued chromebooks often can't even print documents at home!

PS Always buy July/August when Apple has the school sale with student discount. You will save $100-150 and usually get free airpods or the like. Personally I recommend getting additional RAM or whatever it's called now as this will payback in spades as new OS are released because they continuously hog more memory. The HDD memory upgrade is less critical unless your student will be editing/downloading massive amount of video.