Employee Center in Higher Ed context?

Has any higher ed org made the switch to using Employee Center? I have some questions...

1. I was watching this 

https://www.servicenow.com/community/employee-center-events/employee-center-academy-migrating-from-s... and noticed two statements seem to be contradictory: both "Service Portal will become a legacy application" and "EC is an employee-facing portal, for employee use cases. Will still have the customer service portals, intended for external." So which is it? In our case, SP is exclusively for our "customers" - employees, faculty, and staff with ITSM incidents and requests. Is it useless to use Employee Center if we don't have an employee portal case, but a customer one? If EC is only for employees, we're forced to maintain the service portal, anyway?

2. I presume you found you needed to configure different levels of "Employee" to reflect student, faculty, general university staff, and ITSM staff? How did you approach it?

Thanks!