Verifying university membership/attendance via email address

Question

My client's web app allows members to sign up (Rails using AuthLogic) and those signups are limited in that they must be under the auspices of a university. To wit: A university organizer can sign up to be the representative of a university, and students can sign up as "attendees" of that university.

I've been tasked with finding if there is a programmatic way to verify university membership/attendance. The only way I can see doing this is having a database of universities and a database of associated emails, and verifying that the student's email address is part of this database. That doesn't help if using Facebooker and AuthLogic's "sign up with Facebook credentials" ability, however.

I suspect the answer to this is "via human intervention," and that this is something we can't solve programmatically. Either we, or the university, will have to bite the bullet and check records. However, I'd thought I'd ask if anyone else has run into the issue of verification of university membership before.

Answer 1

I've researched this in many places and the only thing I've come up with are hacks centered around an email suffix database. I think the best (and safest) solution (for us) is to have more of a person to person communication with the university admin for this verification, rather than have it fully automated.