Eh you can get new major version updates for about 6 years on Macs, and several more unofficially. It's nothing compared to the 20+ years you could get with Linux, but let's be honest, there's no point in keeping a laptop for that long.
If you don't need the latest and greatest MacOS, I can tell you that the 2012 non-retina Macbook Pro I gave to my mom after I was done with it is still kicking strong and still got security updates up till last year. Sometime this summer I'm gonna have to install the unofficial patch so I can get Monterey or Ventura running on it for 2-3 more years of security updates.
Now I still wouldn't recommend a Mac for a student though. Reason being, I wouldn't recommend a student get a brand new machine unless their parents are rich and I wouldn't recommend Intel Macs to anyone at this point. The ARM ones just blow them out of the water, with ridiculous performance and especially performance per watt metrics. In particular, compiling any big projects is a BREEZE with the ARM chips. But as a student that barely matters if you're mostly doing small to medium sized school projects, not compiling the Linux kernel. And afterwards it should be your employer providing you with the machine, so unless you do hobby projects of huge magnitude or work on large established open source projects, compile times on a personal machine won't matter too much.