Providing Student Email Accounts

We have been ask to look into the possibility of providing a .edu email address to our students.

We are a fully online university that currently has about 30,000 active students.

Has anyone implemented this?

If so, did you create a new domain, a sub-domain off of your primary, or just roll them into your primary domain?

I believe we are going to push the actual mailboxes to O365, but we’re still not sure how to handle the account management piece of it.

Thanks for your help!