I showed this thread to a high school friend of mine who was active in his fraternity and who was economics major.

He agreed with the basic premise, but cautioned that one has to consider the downside of capitalist system. He recalled at his fraternity one year that a lot of men showed up for recruitment/rush events, but when it came to accept bids very few men did that year.

When he and his fratnerity brothers asked around, they discovered that a lot men came to their parties for the beer and the food, but had no intention of pledging ABC fraternity.

As he noted capitalism has its rewards, but also its risks

I'm from a local sorority, so maybe we are playing an entirely different game here, but this is very much so how we do recruitment/pledging. After rush, which is two weeks, every two weeks we are allowed to discuss any problems(small or large) and if someone is a serious concern we will hold a vote to discontinue their pledging process, the only other official vote in the process is the vote into I-Week. This semester we had about 75 girls come to rush over the 2 weeks(our rush events are held entirely separate from NPC's rush, but we heavily encourage researching and looking into other orgs) we ultimately handed out roughly 30-35 bids, 25 were accepted,19 girls completed the process and are now my new sisters.

I know that some people have argued that you don't really get to know pnms until after they cross over, but if you see potential problems in a girl/guy over the first 8 weeks you know them why not drop them instead of letting them spoil the bunch? The threat of them causing problems in the future seems to be a bigger concern than not having someone to bridge the quota gap. Shouldn't it be more about the quality of member you are letting in, rather that the quantity? This is something I've never really been able to wrap my head around concerning the NPC orgs on my campus, especially when I see on bid day 40+ bids handed out and then the following semester half of those girls are no where to be found because they left the org. It seems like a vicious circle of loosing members and gaining members, especially if they decided to do formal recruitment in the fall and recruitment in the spring. As much as I love recruitment and getting to know new girls, I kinda feel like a sorority/fraternity that is always concerned about how many members they have to bring in wouldn't really get to enjoy all the other benefits of being in a greek organization.

Maybe im completely off base, I never post on here, but all the talk on recruitment really interests me and I'd like to understand the NPC perspective a little more.

Yes, you will weed out more people by kicking them out before they get initiated, hazing them to get the "weak" to drop out unless they "really want it", but there is no guarantee that the women that finally get initiated will actually want to come around and spend time with women who treated them poorly before initiation. The NPC process (which differs amongst the member groups) works quite well, thank you! Our chapters do not, as you suggest, have a problem with half our new initiates not participating or actually dropping out every semester. We choose women during recruitment that are accomplished and have something to add to our chapters. They don't have to "prove" themselves to be initiated. They simply learn about our history and customs to decide if making lifetime commitments to our sisterhoods are choices they should really make.

Your process works for your organization, and I hope that hazing is not a part of that process. Personal dignity is not a characteristic that any woman should have to give up to become a part of a sisterhood.

Do you know for sure that the girls are dropping out of the NPCs in that great of numbers or are you just using hyperbole?

Quite frankly, if you have a TWO WEEK rush and you're still having girls drop or having to vote them out during pledgeship, something's rotten in Denmark. You all should have a better gague after all that time of whether someone is right for your group.

There's only one org out of the three that has that extreme of a problem, but membership retainment is a problem across the board.

We take what we are looking for in a sister very seriously, how can you tell in 4 days, or 8 that a girl is actually misleading you about some aspects of herself, there's no telling how someone is going to get along with all the other pledges until the process actually begins, hearing leadership skills on paper is nice, but i like to see what the girls bring to the table in their actions during their process, I feel like having the option to vote out girls gives us a sense of security against girls that we later find out weren't being true to us in the beginning and are going to be a problem or detrimental before they cross over. I also think it's beneficial in the case of girls that are more shy when they come to rush, it gives them the chance to show us who they really are and what they are going to bring to the sorority. You can't predict the future, and you can never tell how a girl will be in 3 days or 3 weeks, but after a while once you have been able to at least have the opportunity to establish a relationship with someone you can truly make a decision on whether they are right for your sorority or not. It shouldn't all be based on what they did in high-school, and how nice a person they are at rush, it should be about the person they are now, and the person you can see them becoming in the future, things you really don't get to see until you have spent real time with girls in more intimate settings.

I guess everyone does what works for them. In the 3 years I've been active we haven't had a new member disaffiliate or go inactive in their first year active except under extreme circumstances(death in family, financial circumstances change, etc.)

Neither have we and that's out of 70-80 new members per year on a highly competitive NPC formal recruitment campus.

While I'm not criticizing your methods, I do wish to explain my GLO's (and I imagine most NPC group's) perspective on new members. The process is called "New Member Education" for a reason. We are talking about 18-19 year olds. Their values, morals, ethics, beliefs, etc are not yet set in stone. One of our primary goals is to educate them, guide them, and help them become the women we believe they are capable of, living up to the high ideals of our organization.

Kicking someone out after only a few days for making a mistake isn't sisterhood. Would someone's (real life) family kick her out when she screwed up or didn't get along with her (real life) sisters? I would hope the parents would show her the error of her ways, perhaps discipline her, and help her become a better person who will make better choices next time.

I'm not saying membership cancellation due to someone's behavioral problems doesn't happen. But that is only after all efforts to educate and counsel that member on appropriate standards of behavior have failed.

Might I point out that you are not privy to what is going on in these groups. How do you know that they are not retaining their members? Do you see their member roles? If they really are losing half of their chapters each semester "across the board", this is extremely odd for NPC organizations.

Ha Ha! I didn't know I was logged in as my sock puppet on my other browser!!

Neither did we, and I was in an NPC.

I do agree with you that high school often doesn't say jack squat about what a person was like in college. Yeah, maybe Susie was the head of SADD and model legislature and heaven knows what else...maybe 1) she was also only doing it because her parents forced her and 2) the groups themselves were jokes. The thing at a lot of the huger chapters though, is that they often have members that went to this or that high school and can confirm that Teens Against Tobacco Use was a joke (against tobacco, not marijuana).

I'm being nebby, but you opened the door. What DO you vote pledges out for? Like I said before if you've had 2 weeks worth of rush (and I assume no silence or no-contact rules) and you STILL can't suss out the real person, what on earth are you looking at?? Especially since (it would seem) your potential membership pool is so much smaller than the NPCs.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sigma_Sigma_Rho

I think my statement was mistakenly a little too broad, I didn't mean that all NPC organizations have that problem, at bigger schools, with many more NPC organizations and a bigger portion of the population interested in being greek, I can totally see how the process works and is beneficial. But at my particular campus it just doesn't seem to fit the demographics of the students here.

I want to make it clear that we in no way haze our girls to make them prove they are "worthy" of being apart of our sisterhood. Our process is much like an educational experience, where we are guiding the girls into the women we know they can become as someone previously expressed. The only thing we do a little different is we have our girls mimic some of the things we do when we're active, such as plan a sisterhood, a philanthropy and a fundraiser as a class so that they can get a feel for what they are getting in to.

We want to make sure we have girls coming in that are going to really be passionate about what they are apart of, and will really be involved and add something to help further improve the org. I think we all can agree that the saddest thing to see is a girl that joins an organization and ends up being unhappy because she wasn't ready for what was coming, I think a lot of girls(more so w/ smaller chapters, less hands, more work) are surprised by how much work and dedication it takes behind the scenes.

A girl is only dropped when there is a serious concern. When a problem is brought to our attention we don't just take it to a vote and thats that. We discuss it at length, find solutions to help the girl, talk to the girl about the problem and give her time to improve on the problem, if there continues to be issues then taking it to a vote would be the next action. There isn't always a vote every 2 weeks, it's just an option. Dropping a girl is always last resort, and is hard on both sides.