Love love LOVE Apple refurbs! I
always recommend them, whenever they're an option. Also love the Air, too - whenever I replace my bulky 15" MBP, it will be with an Air (or
maybe a 13" retina... not sure). The Air I linked was the 13" for $999, so you can definitely get in on the $1-1.2k range. I don't think I'd recommend the 11" Air for college, though; while a dandy machine, I think the small size would get old when typing lots of papers and doing research.
Like others have said,
if she's looking into something heavily graphics-focused, it might be worth looking at the 15" with the dedicated GPU - but, I hate to say it, if she's looking at a program like that, the school will probably require/strongly recommend a particular (probably PC) laptop.
As others have said, if she has a lot of music, the 128GB SSD in the base 13" Air might be a bit small, but I can say this - I have been buying MP3s from iTunes AND have ripped my entire CD collection (not huge by anyone's standards, but probably 300+ discs) and my iTunes library is about 65GB. I
do keep my Movies in a separate folder, though, as I have a metric ton of them.
I'd look for a 13" Air with a 256GB SSD.