LinkedIn Launches New College Profiles

LinkedIn is launching a new section of its social network: University Pages will target younger users who want to connect with university. More than 200 schools already have profile pages, according to the company. As part of the new effort, the company has also dropped its minimum age to 14 in the U.S.

The new college profiles will allow prospective students to see how many of a school's graduates are on the social network, as well as a breakdown of the main fields in which they work. The pages will also list the top employers of alumni.

These details, along with a graph that shows how a user is connected to a school's alumni, could help applicants glean advice or perhaps even a letter of recommendation, in a real-world twist on LinkedIn's "recommend" function.

The service also could serve as a funnel for LinkedIn to grow its membership base — and for the company to tap into the large potential market of users under 25.

Christina Allen, LinkedIn's director of product management, says the idea for the pages came after she saw her daughter and others struggle to find usable information on colleges.

"I knew that hidden in millions of member profiles were powerful insights about the career outcomes of educations from universities around the world," Allen wrote, in a blog post unveiling the new profile pages for schools.