It could be, depending on the number of students. I actually helped manage the Named User licenses for a University once upon a time, and the turnover was pretty low. I had the instructors submit a spreadsheet of their enrolled students, which you can use to batch-create users in your AGOL / Enterprise org, so it's not too bad.
If you go that route, you may want to choose the option of letting invited users set up their own account, as opposed to creating usernames for them. That way if a student already has a public account with AGOL, they can bring it "into" the AGOL org. The key benefit here is that at the end of the semester, you can downgrade all the students (you can even schedule a python script to do this at the end of the semester for you), and if any of them enroll in a GIS course the next semester, they can re-use the same account as before.
I left before it was implemented, but there was discussion of getting set up with SAML so that university users could just use their same student/faculty login as well. Might be worth looking into as well.
And since Pro is designed to be AGOL / Enterprise connected, the default setting should prompt them to sign in with a username / password. As long as they've been assigned a Pro license in the organization settings, they should be able to successfully authenticate and use Pro without manually changing all the licensing settings per-machine.
- Josh Carlson
Kendall County GIS
