It really depends what your daughter wants to do with it.
I am a commercial voice major and do a lot of recording as well, so I find my Powerbook G4 with Logic Pro 7 ($299 academic discount; $1000 commercial) quite useful (the PowerBook's have an useable condensor mic that's nice for free, although I prefer an mbox and a couple of low-grade studio condensors for my own project studio).
Almost without question, I would recommend against Sibelius or Finale for a music major (unless, possibly, they are going to do composition/theory) simply because those programs do not tend to reward musicianship and they are primarily graphical, not musical, programs--a good analogy would be whether an author would use typesetting software or a word processor. The answer is generally that the author uses a fairly normal word processor (many use MS-Word after all), whereas the *publisher* uses the typesetting software. In the same sense, composers usually don't really need a program such as finale/sibelius and actually do need realistic audio instruments such as what Logic (Mac) or Sonar (PC) provide.
In addition, these two programs offer an awesome array of audio editing, recording, sequencing, and other production tools useful to someone wanting to enter the music industry.
If you want to go with free software, you can go that route as well.
There is a free multi-track recorder that does quite well known as Audacity at
http://audacity.sourceforge.net
and the free Finale Notepad (
www.finalemusic.com/notepad ) works quite nicely for a free piece of software. For the sequencing side of things, Anvil Studio (
www.anvilstudio.com ) is a tried and true free sequencer (PC), as is the free Jazz++ (
http://www.jazzware.com/zope )
There is an ongoing discussion on this here:
http://singing.eblah.com/cgi-bin/Bla...141,s=17#num16