Computer Help and Support

Lenovo is good for serviceability. But flagships from HP, Asus, Dell and Acer are all solid, budget models is where this issues really arise.

Many models have fixed Ram lately. The issue you will have to balance for them is power, upgrade-ability, weight and secondary specs like screen size and suitability for secondary uses. Also the choosing between Mac, Linux and Windows. Apple and now the new Arm Windows laptops use a new processor type that has dramatically longer battery life. Many Windows models still have up-gradable storage, whereas you are stuck on Mac.

https://www.reddit.com/r/computers/comments/1czrnjy/arm_based_windows_laptop_as_an_engineering_student/

It will come down to which discipline they are studying and how much power they need in the laptop, they need to get a list of software used in the program and see which way to go from there.