To be honest, do not buy a refurbished Chrome book. You would be better suited to a used or refurbished windows machine.
For college, I assume you are going to type a lot. A cramped keyboard on an 11in laptop of any kind will make you hate your assignments even more.
Also, the 16 or 32gb storage these Chromebooks come with is insufficient for holding much at all. If you buy refurbished, you might not even get the "free" cloud space to store documents and stuff with the machine.
Also, only the cut down mobile versions of Microsoft Office apps can be used on a Chromebook. You will be stuck with Google substitutes.
Just not a good idea.