I bought my son a MacBook Pro at Costco because they have price protection in case the price drops. Granted I am a tech nerd, so I went a little overboard on the specs, but we liked the macbook pro over the air because it had built-in ports like HDMI, etc. Having all USB-C is fine on the Air, but you need to rely on dongles.
His specs were way more than he will need, but we got the M3 Pro chip, 12 Core CPU, 18 Core GPU, 18GB Memory and 1 TB Storage.
You definitely shouldn’t need that many cores or that much memory for a high school computer. I personally hate running out of storage on a laptop.
We are an all-Apple family, so going with the Mac is easier for my tech support.