Depends on the specifics of your data naturally

I've had to do it before ... luckily, I had a 'master' list of schools to work from, because it was for a state board of licensure, so I could be (reasonably) assured that all of the schools were accredited

In my particular case, I ran into situations like the following:

# there are four different schools in this list:
U Maryland
U Maryland College Park
U Maryland Baltimore
U Maryland Baltimore Campus
U Maryland at Baltimore
U Maryland Baltimore County
U Baltimore
[download]

Of course, it was _much_ worse than that, but there were some recognizable patterns (not including punctuation / capitalization):

U of (state)
Univ (state)
U (state)
University of (state)
(state)
[download]

The messy part was when they started mixing universities and colleges ('Speed School' is the 'University of Louisville'; 'Clark School' is 'University of Maryland, College Park')