Less than two years after its launch, Facebook is ending Campus, a section of its app designed for college students, and it appears to be the final blow to the company’s efforts to retain young users. Users of the Campus application, defined as “Facebook within Facebook”, were able to access a special news feed and join groups, events and chat rooms focused on university life. It also included a directory where users could find and befriend other students on the app.
Facebook spokesperson Leah Luchetti said in an emailed statement to The Verge, “We’ve decided to end our Facebook Campus pilot,” adding: “We’ve learned a lot about the best ways to support college students and “Facebook Groups are one of the most effective tools to help bring them together. We’ve notified students at test schools that Campus is no longer available and have recommended relevant college Facebook groups to join.”
Luchetti also stated that all profiles, groups, posts, events and other Campus content will be permanently deleted. Users can download Campus data before March 10, when the episode will be unavailable. Additionally, Facebook informed users of the shutdown via an in-app message.
Campus, launched in September 2020, initially piloted 30 US schools, each segregated from the others, so that users could only interact with other students in their school. It left the main Facebook app and allowed users to have Campus profiles separate from their main Facebook profiles. Facebook eventually expanded the Campus to include 60 colleges and universities, and it was talking about plans to add more colleges by January, as TechCrunch noted.
Facebook itself started on a college campus: Mark Zuckerberg and several of his classmates founded the platform, originally called TheFacebook, at Harvard and initially limited it to Harvard students only.
But in recent years, Facebook, now part of parent company Meta, has struggled to attract and retain young users. Internal notices leaked last year showed that the number of young users of the main app has decreased by 13 percent since 2019 and that number will continue to decline. The company’s research also shows that younger users engage with the app much less than older users.
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