<p>A lot of it depends on personal preference as well as your student's area of focus. Finding laptops in class is rare enough outside of the school of engineering, where the highest number will appear in computer science courses. There are exceptions, of course, with computers appearing in math classes and the like, but pen & paper is still the primary means of taking notes.</p>
<p>In no way will your student absolutely need a computer to attend lectures. It may be useful in some circumstances and s/he may prefer typing notes to handwriting, but it doesn't offer any distinct advatage -- with perhaps one exception I'll mention later.</p>
<p>If you go with a laptop, the size/layout of the campus doesn't really matter much. You'll have to find a balance between portability and features -- the ultralight portables will be more convenient while the fully-featured "desktop replacements" will be significantly heavier by possibly twice as much. Battery life will also vary by feature set and size. The #1 power drain is from the screen, so a larger screen tends to draw more power... meaning shorter battery life OR larger batteries. Short battery life means the laptop might not last more than one or two classes, but heavier batteries mean more weight (and often a larger computer) which may mean it gets left behind in the residence once the novelty wears off.</p>
<p>I thought it was very rare to find an actual docking station -- most students simply worked on the laptop itself in their rooms, though some had external monitors to use. A docking station with full-size keyboard and monitor won't take up too much space because there's always enough room for a larger, "full size" desktop computer; the laptop setup will almost always take up less space.</p>
<p>Laptops are more fragile and easier to misplace or have stolen, so keep that factor in mind. Often the convenience of portability outweighs this risk factor. Laptops are convenient when going on weekend trips or home for the holidays, so any computer-required work wouldn't need to stay at school as it does with a desktop. Do take extra care with portables, though, because I heard of at least two laptop screen replacements required last year due to careless and/or intoxicated roommates.</p>
<p>Rice IT supports laptops and desktops equally. Each student in an on-campus residence has one ethernet network port for access to campus computing resources and the Internet in general. You're responsible for all user hardware (computer, network card/adapter, ethernet cable, etc.) and each college has a couple resident student "Campus Computing Associates" (CCAs) who provide simple tech support and set-up assistance. Rice supports student-owned Macs/PCs equally.</p>
<p>In my final two years at Rice I was fortunate to have a tablet PC donated by Microsoft. If your student is technologically inclined, plans to get a laptop anyway, and you're willing to pay a bit of a premium price, I highly recommend them. My Toshiba looks and works like a regular laptop computer, but I can rotate and fold-down the screen and, using the provided digital stylus, write on the screen as if it were a digital piece of paper. I can then perform searches on my handwritten notes, organize them later, rearrange diagrams, or print notes at my convenience. I absolutely loved it -- and it's just as fast as you can write on a regular sheet of paper, without the obstacles of trying to get math equations into a word-processor where it's harder to draw or find the proper symbols. This is perhaps one of the few advantages a laptop, specifically a tablet, can offer in a classroom setting. Most other uses simply offer the distraction of e-mail or instant messaging.</p>