The registration process for institutions with confirmation enabled seems unnecessarily difficult. I think it could be streamlined a bit.
1. The 'Reason' field could be added to the initial registration form rather than on its own separate page. It could be hidden with javascript whenever an institution that doesn't require approval is selected in the drop-down. Reason could also be optional rather than required, because in many cases the admin will be able to approve registrations based on the email address.
2. The user might not need to go through two steps of clicking the link in an email. I think we could treat the second (post-approval) one as email verification as well as account creation. So after filling in the registration form, the user could go straight to something like "Your registration has been submitted for approval by Foo College. An email will be sent to <email address hidden> with further registration details soon." After approval, clicking on the link from the approval email would verify the email & create the account. The downside could be a few more registrations with bad email addresses going to the institution admin, but I think the admin could still be confident that she is only approving the real owner of the email.
What would happen when you don't have javascript turned on / use a screen reader?