That might sound an obvious yes considering that LinkedIn is a platform for professional networking, but I wonder perhaps it’s better to wait for a while before accepting, until one is comfortable with the student.

I have a student in my network that I noticed has added many people in my network to theirs. Long story short, later it turned out that the person seems to be a crazy sociopath, and, among many other things, uses reputational damage to obtain benefits. Like, the person would ask for benefits and if you decline, would send blatant lies to the department head, dean and so on. It turned out that we have many people in common in LinkedIn and I’m at risk of additional harm through social media particularly our common network. I can remove the person from my network, but that doesn’t remove the common contacts.