TikTok’s college-centric update is a nod to OG Facebook

TikTok wants you to stay true to your school.

The ByteDance-owned app has introduced a new feature that invites users to connect their accounts to the colleges and universities they have attended. After inputting that information, users will be able to see a list of other TikTok accounts that are affiliated with the same schools.

The feature is available for both current students and alumni. Users who connect to schools will have their alma mater and graduation year listed on their accounts. At launch, more than 6,000 colleges and universities are available to choose from. TikTok compiled that list in partnership with UNiDAYS, a company that verifies students’ scholastic affiliations.

If this all sounds familiar to you, congratulations, you’re old. Facebook famously launched in 2004 as a haven where university students (initially just at Harvard) could connect with one another. TikTok’s take on that design is less strict — you don’t need a .edu email address to sign up — but the new feature is a reminder that the experience now known as “OG Facebook” is trending up more than 20 years after its initial rollout.

Meta itself is part of that revival. Mark Zuckerberg has spoken publicly about the importance of bringing back the exciting, communal feeling that defined Facebook in its early days. A retooling of the Friends feed

is part of that effort, as are some test features on Meta-owned Instagram.

TikTok has its own reasons to serve college students. The app has been associated with youth culture since its mid-2010s breakout. As those users have grown up, they have brought TikTok to college with them. That demographic shift has produced a number of platform-wide trends, including public sharing of college admissions decisions and Greek life vlogs that are grouped together on the #RushTok hashtag.

As the latest “season” of #RushTok shows, college life is still a big topic on TikTok. The new university identifiers will keep that discussion alive even after the currently-enrolled TikTokers graduate.

Does that cultural connector come with security flaws? TechCrunch speculated that the new feature could make it easier to track users, thus raising safety concerns. But if you think back to 2004, Facebook’s original requirement of a .edu address created another layer of security by making it harder to register fraudulent accounts. So perhaps TikTok can reframe its campus-centered feature as a nod to user safety — it could certainly use the PR boost.