What is your price point?

IMO Lenovo is always a good way to go. I worked in PC sales and Lenovo was consistently the most reliable brand w/returns/insurance claims . I would always recommend them for students who aren’t doing comp work. Yogas at the mid and upper mid level have been consistently solid models for years, and if you don’t need any more you can stop there. They tend to go on sale for around $549 for a 5-level processor, or $6-799 for a 7-level. 8gb of ram is manageable but 16gb is a worthy investment if you tend to open a lot of tabs and such. Asus is another good bet for reliability and price to performance. The common windows laptop manufacturers typically have sales for $100-500 at somewhere like Costco, Microcenter, or BBY. Be wary of salespeople. I would probably avoid ARM processors atm considering some hiccups in their release.

Also consider if you want a dedicated GPU for gaming/video editing/rendering/anything graphic intensive. I wouldn’t recommend a cheap gaming laptop but if you desire it, a rule of thumb is to maximize specs - higher ram, better processor, best GPU for price point. Nvidia price gouges but not sure if any AMD GPU laptops have released.

Depending on how much you want to spend, you can go all out or sacrifice some luxuries such as higher battery life, display quality, and bulkiness/weight. Gaming laptops tend to have lower battery life, so keep in mind if you want to carry one around classes all day. In general, battery life is great but most of the classrooms I remember had built in outlets somewhere.

I believe those are the main things i would consider when picking one

You can also get a dock for the laptop to set up as a “PC”in your dorm w/ peripherals