How to score applications and do intelligent analytics on barriers/drivers for customers?

We are running an online high school and using the EDA package (+ custom objects) to store applications data in Salesforce. Our Marketing team would like to build stronger functionality around scoring applications and reporting on what barriers or drivers influence applications in various ways.

In Sales cloud, this feels like a good use case for Lead/Opportunity scoring and even using Einstein to help model and understand customer behaviour, drivers and barriers. However, we are not using Leads or Opportunities, and I don't quite understand how Leads/Opportunities could fit alongside "Applications". So my main questions are:

1. How have other people used leads & opportunities in tandem with Applications (if at all)? 
2. How have other people using EDA built functionality to better score and understand behaviour of applicants (future customers)? Have you used Einstein to do this at all, or just good reports?
3. Does einstein analytics have a place in this solution? Or should we just be using simple fields to add datapoints to Applications (e.g. a "Barriers" multi-select picklist) and then do our own analysis via reports or other reporting tools?

Thanks in advance!