That looks fairly reasonable 
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It looks ok to me too. Not terrific though! 
However, it doesn’t sound like that is precluding the use of a Mac for the duration of your daughter’s studies. Sounds like a general computer business course rather than actuarial science.
I wouldn’t worry about her graduating and being unable to truly use a PC for work. Once you have a Mac down, a PC just falls into place although it can get frustrating (my bias). It’s lateral learning (new argot).
That is one awesome computer she has. I just think it would be a shame to have to give it up.
She may even turn out to be nerdy once she starts going to town on her Mac. PC’s are rather boring. Enthusiasm can go a long way.
Best of luck to her! Whatever you decide, it will work out ok.
I’ve been watching this thread with interest and surprisingly, it’s quite active Academic topics aren’t always that vibrant.
I think that telling the student what to expect with their technology is not unreasonable. I teach Geospatial Science along with Web Dev at our community college. For GS we run a Windows environment because the big player in that space runs on Windows. And you will use that software during your time with us at the College, so we warn students in advance, it will be very difficult to run with a Mac or even Linux/Unix for our classes.
For VDI, we use Horizon from VMWare and I gotta say it’s pretty snappy. Now if you are munging massive amounts of data, it might slow the VDI, but it works quite well otherwise. Of course, if you want to run something other than Windows, this is what you will use, so be prepared, cause it may be snappy today, in 5 minutes it might not be.
For my web dev classes, students can use anything and everything without fuss, except for Chromebook, it just doesn’t play nice. And again, we let students know that too.
Typically, I like to buck the system and force the Mac (that was my original piece of advice), but in this case, I would say follow the teacher’s recommendations, it’s their class/program and they know what works.
The good news is, you get a new MacBook, unless she changes her major 
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Just out of genuine curiosity: what prevents Chromebooks from playing nice?
I enabled Linux on the Chromebook I picked up to experiment with. It turns out I got one with an ARM chip, so Zotero wouldn’t install.
VSCode installed without issue, though, and I assume Chrome dev tools would work fine.
Of course, I have only a beginner’s knowledge of webdev, so I assume there’s something I’m missing. 
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James, Mac does sell refurbished machines. I just checked. Are you sure they don’t take the trade-ins on current Macs? I’d give them a call. It would be in their best interest to do so. Aren’t newer machines coming out very soon? I always like to double-check my information. Sometimes it pays off.
Update: We have Citrix Workspace and VDI working.
Remembering @ismh’s tip from an MPU episode a while back, I employed screen sharing in Messages. Daughter was able to share her screen and I could talk her through the process of downloading and installing, while watching her do it. Turns out, this works really well. I was startled when I could hear her voice coming through my speaker, though .
Once the VDI was up and running, we easily found the Windows 10 desktop the instructor provided and I helped her set up her OneDrive account. We practiced opening an Excel file and saving it to OneDrive. I then helped her log into her OneDrive from the native Mac environment.
The VDI/Windows seemed responsive enough in a good WiFi environment. We’ll see if this proves to be a good solution for this, and future classes.
Incidentally, my daughter was told during orientation that the University upgraded their campus-wide Internet/WiFi bandwidth over the summer. Makes sense, in case they need to go back to a lockdown situation and everyone is doing remote learning.
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Yep, refurbs would be an option, but I was not able to get a M1 MBP to show up when I tried to get a trade-in price. I could call/visit an Apple store, but we’re not ready for that step yet.
Oh ok, good. Happy to hear it. I usually call Apple Care. They are awesome. They would just route you to their Sales Dept. I can never get through to an Apple Store.
Is your daughter enjoying school?
My nephew couldn’t wait until he got back to college!
I managed to get through four years of college without ever having to type a paper! I cannot type. LOL!. But my handwriting is nice. So I begged. “Just so long as I can read it!”
Calculators were a couple of hundred dollars a piece! We had to wait hours for a computer print-out.
“The Times They Are a Changing!”
Chromebook users, unless experienced, have trouble with file saving, uploading to the server, etc. So maybe not so much Chromebook themselves, but Chromebook users 
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There you go! Good to hear the Citrix solution works. Now she can enjoy the best of both worlds
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Hah. Count me as one of those. I was helping someone set up / settle into their Chromebook. One day, the device decided something wasn’t quite right, and deleted everything (it’s a security feature…).
In theory, we could have recovered it, but (a) they hadn’t gotten around to putting everything in Google Drive, and (b) they changed their password at just the wrong time and didn’t remember the one they’d need to recover.
Moral: If you use a Chromebook, make sure you keep EVERYTHING in Google Drive.
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Hello! I am just curious if she ever found a solution that is working for her. Also, does her school have computer labs or libraries with computers that she could use for things like this? When I was a junior at university, I was pretty strapped for cash and my HDD died so I worked out of computer labs and libraries for a while.
The jury is still out on a long-term solution, but for this semester, the Citrix Workspace/VDI/Windows is working fine.
Yes, there is a computer lab if she needs it, but knowing her, she would only use it if a meteor destroyed her MBP.
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