How much can a .EDU blog post link help?

My university allows us to set up blogs (wordpress powered), so it will look something like: sites.XXX.edu/username
The username can be a keyword and we can set up multiple sites. The blogs aren't really monitored but I'm not planning on running any CPA or anything like that on them not sure if it would be a good idea, but would setting up 1 or 2 blogs and creating about 2 articles posts about a niche and then posting back links to money site help more than a PBN blog link since it's EDU or would I pretty much have to also supercharge the blog by building back links to it?

It is against policy to use the blogs to advertise a business so I'm not sure if linking to a site from blog post counts as that.

Google doesn't value .edu links as they used to before. You might get decent link juice from it.

Completely depends on where on the site it is. Homepage? Inner page?

It's better than not having an edu link

Obviously helpful, but how much, is open to testing.