I have a budget of around $750 and I expect to be able to code in it. I honestly have not much idea what the ideal requirement of a laptop for a college student should be, which is why I am asking here to get an estimate of the specs I should be considering while choosing one. I would advice against naming any specific laptop as I have no guarantee of its availability in my region.
If you have a desktop at home, what was working super well for me was to just get a cheap laptop, and figure out Wake on Lan through RPI. When I needed to do anything that demanded more than running a simple text editor from my laptop, I just WoL my desktop and connected using Parsec. I never ran into issues, but it depends on WiFi you have (or having an unlimited mobile data plan, which I also have).
I could play any game through Parsec without any issues, and when they asked us to work in Unreal Engine, I was one of the only ones actually being able to run it without major stuttering and such a long loading times.