LinkedIn has launched a new feature that aims to help you keep in touch with your friends from college or university. The Classmates feature provides insights and networking for alumni of colleges and universities all over the world.

The tool offers insights about fellow alumni from your school, whether or not they were in the same graduating class as you. It provides you with access to the professional profiles they’ve shared on LinkedIn.

Classmates lets you view what fellow alumni have achieved since graduation to help you broaden your horizons and expand your knowledge of the types of careers and jobs that might be possible for you. One of the main aspects of the feature is that it allows you to reconnect with your old college and university friends. You’ll be able to find alumni in your field that you can reach out to for advice and to discover career opportunities.

Another interesting aspect of the feature is that it lets you view interactive graphs to visualize information about alumni from your school as a whole. When you click on the bars in the graphs, you can find out information about who is working at certain companies, where they’re working and what their job functions are.

From the Classmates feature, you can directly access profile summaries of certain people, which lets you view the connections and groups you have in common. You can then invite them to connect or send them messages if you choose. If you’ve attended more than one college or university, you can select a different school to view from a drop-down menu.

The feature is set up for you to view people who attended a school at the same time as you. You can check out alumni from other years by changing the dates or view who was in a specific graduating class. Since some LinkedIn users prefer not to list the dates they attended a school, there’s an option to view alumni who do not list their dates.

This is an interesting move by LinkedIn and one that makes perfect sense. It’s a way to help you find those friends from college or university you may have forgotten about, while helping you find valuable professional contacts from your past too. Finding someone who you went to school with that works at a company you’re trying to get hired at could provide the key to you landing your dream job.

LinkedIn recently acquired social contact management service Connected and real-time search provider IndexTank. The company also revealed details of its Talent Pipeline tool, which will help recruiters manage talent leads when hiring for a new position.

You can check out the new Classmates feature now.