mare you planning on playing games on ur 15 inch 60hz display as well?
id recommend just getting a cheap (200 or less) burner laptop for classes and buying a decently specced out desktop
youll get better gaming performance at home and better portability/battery life
Performance for any decent desktop at the 900 dollar range probably isnt that better then a 1300-1100 dollar laptop unless you dump most of that money on the gpu/cpu combo, which doesn't really leave you with much for anything else. Any desktop hes going to be building for 800, 900 dollars, not counting cost of a monitor and all that good stuff. also really depends on if he is going to be living in a dorm, because i would not trust having an expensive desktop in a dorm room
If you do some research there are laptops out there that don't perform at the 600 dollar desktop range, I'm not quite sure where that came about, unless your looking at really old gaming laptops. These days the the gap is not that big
You can find desktop parts in laptops, but those get into the 1800 dollar range new, but you can probably find a used alienware with a desktop 1070 on ebay or desktop 1080. If you want to go used then theres all sorts of really good deals to be had.