Why not change the policy so that recruitment takes place in the spring and freshmen are eligible to participate? Less time and expense for everyone rather than having multiple formal recruitments. Lots of schools have deferred spring recruitment.

Just for giggles I looked in the green book. My copy is 16th edition. Page 90 NPC Policies and Unanimous Agreements:

1. A membership recruitment period should be held in the fall, as close as possible to the start of the academic year, and be conducted in as short of a period of time as possible.

2. NPC recommends College Panhellenics sponsor no more than one structured recruitment per academic year

Have you talked with your NPC area adviser And the NPC
Delegates for your groups? I'd start with them to get their
More seasoned advice.

Violet pretty could confirm, but Maryland (and Cornell) have spring formal with structured informal in the fall. During informal, chapters may bid up to total with no quota being calculated.

With these women who get to school with their semester of credits under their belt...do they typically do fine? Or do they get to "real college" and their grades go in the toilet?

Part of the point of deferring rush is to make sure that freshmen can thrive in a college environment gradewise. However, the other parts are so that they can see the sororities "warts and all" and to see if they can thrive in all the other parts of college....living away from home, etc.

From the way you describe things you have a more cosmopolitan student body than most and I don't think the latter part of the above sentence is a problem. However, if it IS an issue that women get to campus and don't want to look at all the sororities - only have their minds set on one, usually the biggest most popular - then I think you should defer things for everyone until sophomore fall.

There have been precedents on campuses regarding ISP overuse, what is usually done is that the woman is not permitted to pledge the sorority she ISPed for a year. (i.e. you can't ISP and then join when they're trying to get up to quota, total, or formal rush).

Are all the chapters at or near total?

[QUOTE=33girl;2179501
There have been precedents on campuses regarding ISP overuse, what is usually done is that the woman is not permitted to pledge the sorority she ISPed for a year. (i.e. you can't ISP and then join when they're trying to get up to quota, total, or formal rush).

Are all the chapters at or near total?[/QUOTE]

I would question a CPH that tried this as I would venture it's not allowed by NPC.

This was a CPC in BFE who had a mixed local and national recruitment and could get away with it. :) This was also a while ago.

Obviously the better thing would have been to lower total so everyone wasn't COBing all the time and this would have been a moot point.

BFE???

Egypt

Butt...let's just say Fornicate. LOL

Now that I bring that up, I'm going to go see if a Beta Phi Epsilon exists anywhere.

Success! It does.

Two years ago when I was an alum attending initiation for the fall pledge class at Maryland, this was how it worked. Fall was informal recruitment only.

I'm actually pretty surprised the UAs say all this.

"Should be" and "recommends" are code words for "we want everything to run this way but know there's not a snowball's chance in hell that it ever will."

Obviously these things were pushed through by a Panhellenic whose members (i.e. the actual humans sitting there, not the orgs) skewed to larger schools/rushes. Personally I don't see the point of "shoulds" that you can't enforce in any way.

Hello, thank you all so much for your advice and sorry for the long delay in response.

We are in the process of getting in touch with our NPC area advisor--we didn't even know that we had one! Thanks again, you GCers are such a wealth of information!