Because I found pretty much nothing on this issue, I decided to write a post about it because it can put a big halt in IT driven onboarding.

We all know there is a way to provision OneDrive for the user, there are KB articles on how you do it and a lot of smart people has written scripts to work around the shortcomings of the commands that we can use. BUT… this is apparently only the case for an ADM tenants

As it works now, if you have an EDU tenant, you can’t in any way provision a user’s OneDrive from an IT-driven perspective. The only thing that works is if the user logs in and provisions their own OneDrive.

I’ve had a long MS case about this that just got closed, since there is pretty much no info on this issue I assumed it was a bug or something was wrong with the service.

What we found is that the commands do work if you run them on the backend, so the servers are able to run the commands regardless of tenant type. The issue is when you connect with the same account from the outside (normal powershell connection to SharePoint) the provisioning-command seems to be dropped when ran towards a EDU tenant.
The command never reaches the backend server. In this case the customer was onboarding users home-directories and it came to a halt for 500~ users since we couldn’t pre-provision the OneDrives for them.

The hard thing for me to understand is, it is regardless of license type, I would have understood if it was not possible IF the user had a EDU license tied to the account, that would make sense. But as it stands now it is not possible at all if the tenant type is Education.
Will update this in the future if this changes or if a work-around for this is found. And please give a shout-out if you know of a way to solve this issue! that is, enable IT-driven onboarding of on EDU tenants

Edit: Woho! there is a way to fix this now, go to my update:
https://www.altitude365.com/2017/03/29/eureka-onedriveforbusiness-in-edu-tennants/