When you see the word “LinkedIn”, do you think that it is only a site for business people? In the past, LinkedIn was merely a professional social media platform that allowed employed adults to connect online with friends and coworkers. Over the past two years, LinkedIn has created the “Education” tab where high school students can explore colleges, universities, and career interests. This new feature gives students an opportunity to decide where they want to go to college and what they want to do post-college all on one website.

Once you create a profile, you have access to 4 programs designed for students: LinkedIn University Finder, Field of Study Explorer, University Rankings, and Find Alumni. University Finder presents you with a list of subjects that you may want to study in college, businesses where you may want to work, and places where you may want to live. This provides students with more personalized information that narrows down their college search faster than searching for colleges’ information on Google. If you click one of the blue tabs in the picture below, you can see the number of people enrolled on LinkedIn who studied specific majors at particular universities.

For example, clicking on the University of Notre Dame’s profile returns the university’s profile and the different careers of its alumni, in addition to its ranking according to several important majors and people you may know who have attended that school.

The next feature is University Rankings. This program displays the schools best known for launching their students into particular fields. In the picture below, Carnegie Mellon University and the School of Visual Arts are ranked #1 and #2 respectively for the most students who have obtained jobs in their preferred field. If you are interested in a particular field, you can click on one of the universities shown and receive a list of the top 25 universities LinkedIn has identified for that major. From there, you can see university profiles that have statistics and information about their top fields of study. LinkedIn has stated that they “analyzed millions of alumni profiles to find out how universities stack up across a variety of careers. Then, they ranked schools based on how successful their recent graduates have been at landing desirable jobs as designers, software developers, investment bankers, and more.”

After exploring different colleges and universities, you may want to see the statistics about majors and minors of interest. The picture below is a search for Foreign Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics. From this information, you can see that around 7,000 LinkedIn members studied this field in college and work in various parts of companies such as sales, education or media.