Creating a "Universities Attended" Profile field/block (Drupal)

Question

Interesting question for everyone. So I have am thinking of adding a "university attended" field to the profile page of members in Drupal. I guess I am trying to figure out the best way to go about it. I was originally thinking of a text field, but than I thought you could get multiple instances of of university names, making it hard to sort people by school (ie. UF, University of Florida, Florida, U of F, etc). I then began to think about creating a drop down, but I wasn't quite sure where I could get a listing of all the schools. Perhaps I could find a database population that a site like LinkedIn or Facebook uses. Then I thought of what happens when someone has attended multiple schools, how would I account for that?

So, I guess I wanted to pose the question of how would you go about adding a University(ies) attended field to profile pages if you had to design a site to do so?

Answer 1

Here's a list of colleges in America: http://www.iamnext.com/academics/americanu.html

If it were me, I'd just give them one select list, and call it something like "Main college attended" instead of allowing for multiple colleges.

However, if that's not an option, then I guess your best bet is creating a new "Profile" content type and giving that content type a "College" field with a limit higher than 1, and then a user reference field. That way, you can leave out the core profile module altogether and use CCK instead for whatever you'd be using profile for. But that tends to get a bit messy.