LinkedIn creates ‘University Pages’, opens to high school students

The pages will allow high schoolers to engage with alumni and members of a campus community, search for universities around the world, and get a head start on building an alumni network.

The changes in LinkedIn’s policies and pages come at a time when many teenagers are starting to leave social networking sites like Facebook even as more universities are attempting to reach students through social media than ever before.

For years, Facebook has allowed universities to have a presence on the site by creating a “fan page.”

A recent survey of 2,000 college-bound high school juniors and seniors found that the amount of students using Facebook had fallen 12 percentage points from last year to 67 percent.

Meanwhile, according to a survey of student affairs professionals, seventy-one percent of those working in student affairs use Facebook to connect with students.

By lowering its age requirement, LinkedIn could be positioned to fill the engagement gap created by such discrepancies, granting high school students access to hundreds of universities and nearly 240 million professionals.