The initial memory I have of signing up for Facebook is my brother informing me that it was reserved for college students. He had gone off to college and was annoyed to find his younger sibling on the emerging social media site.

For those who are aware of Facebook’s backstory — or who have viewed The Social Network — you know it debuted in 2004 as a platform intended for connecting college students. At first, it was limited to Harvard, later branching out to additional colleges, evolving into an online directory for students that included lists of interests, groups, and contact details.

Nonetheless, a few years later, Facebook became accessible to everyone, transforming the entire landscape. Fast forward to 2025, and it seems TikTok is striving to mirror some of that original Facebook functionality. On Tuesday morning, it introduced a new feature dubbed Campus Verification, perfectly timed for the upcoming school year. This makes sense, considering a 2024 Pew Research Center study revealed that around six-in-ten teens claim to use TikTok frequently.

In a press statement, TikTok characterized it as “a new feature that allows students to verify their enrollment, connect with classmates, and turn TikTok into a center for real-world connections and belonging on campus.” In practical terms, it enables students to include their college on their profile, browse the school’s page, filter by graduation year, and identify which peers have the most followers.

It presents a straightforward way to 1.) verify your school and 2.) locate others at the same college with shared interests. Here’s a glimpse of it via TikTok.

TikTok is rolling out the feature to 6,000 U.S. universities in collaboration with UNiDAYS, a platform for student verification. The process is simple: click “add school” on your TikTok profile and follow the prompts.

While Campus Verification isn’t precisely the same as early Facebook, it provides similar usefulness. Everything old finds a way to become new again.