title: PHP/MySQL List of university coordinates
body: <p>I am trying to get the user's coordinates and get a short list of the nearest universities in the area.</p>
  
  <p>So my initial thoughts were to populate my own MySQL with a heck of a lot of universities and coordinates, so I can use a searching algorithm to match the closest handful of universities  with the data in my database.</p>
  
  <p>Is that realistic to accomplish?  To find a list of all universities, I have looked at: <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1970789/college-university-list-for-populating-an-auto-complete-field">this question</a>, and when I went to <a href="http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/datacenter/InstitutionList.aspx" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the site</a>, it seemed like the files were exported as .uid?  I'm not sure how to deal with this.  Also, if I have a list of universities, how can I get the coordinates of them?  Would geocoder work?  If it's possible I would also like a list of high schools, but ignore that for now.</p>
  
  <p>What do you think?  Am I missing something?  Is there a more efficient way to get a list of the closest universities to a user?</p>