I have used macs for about 8 years, my school had everything beside the Mac Pro (not to be confused with the macbook pro)
And I have owned a macbook pro for about 4 years. macbook 2012 & 2015

Here are my recommendations.

Macbook Air:
for lightweight work. taking notes, making powerpoints, etc.
also very portable

Macbook:
for average workload, maybe some very light photo editing.
Older versions not as portable as new versions

Macbook Pro:
for heavy workloads on the go. photo editing, video editing, etc.
but it's still a laptop, so it will never be as good as a dedicated work station.
the newer versions are faster, but they have limited io.
If you need a disk drive go with 2012 model.
if you need usb and don't care about disk drive than go with the 2015.
and if you don't need both, or don't care about dongles, then go with the new one.

For thw price of those you can go to new egg , build & buy a faster pc with more memory and a i7

Dell Xps

Dells will work just as well for school really, I feel like macbooks are over priced and over rated really, I mean yea it's really popular in college and stuff like that but you're gonna be paying so much for a mac that really almost any other computer can do.