Denying whats obviously there is lame.

Very interesting discussion, much of which I agree with. As to the tier thing, everything tends to be ranked (schools, grad schools, sports teams) some of which is based on performance and a lot on perception. My intital point, which was not clearly made, was that three people on another site, ranked houses. That information was then posted here as an accurate list. And the three that made the list were bashing houses (a low tier activity in my mind). They might be right in the rankings, but I think the guy going through rush should consider the source of the list.

While I don't condone "bashing houses", you have to admit that at nearly every campus there are houses which are running jokes amongst everyone better than them. To strongly object to tiers and honest observations about houses suggests (as has been mentioned) that someone is in one of these fairly low rated houses and resents the fact that they wound up somewhere other than top-tier.

I didn't go reread the tier thread in question, but it's generally reasonable to assume that most of the posters are somewhere between the top tier and the middle of the second tier. If you aren't looking for a "fratty" house or social events with the top sororities, than no the list may not apply to you.

But again to just say "look at them making fun of bad houses and making these arbitrary tiers, they are ridiculing the lower tier, that's lower tier in itself" only suggests to me that you protest a bit too much and aren't real happy with where others consider your house to fit in to that matrix.

EE-BO, a little off topic, but, I've been wondering how the top 10% rule (especially this year, which was brutal) will affect this, and the greek system as a whole.

As it becomes more and more difficult to get in UT, less and less of your typical "fraternity type" guys are getting accepted. I know that at our high school this year, pretty much NOBODY who would normally go "top tier" got in. They are mostly all heading to A&M, which was their second choice, but they got accepted:o there. These boys include some strong, big dollar, legacy types to "top tier" houses at Texas.

Will an opening up to non-feeder type schools have to occur to keep up the quality of the pledges?

I know when I mentioned some of the guys who are going to Texas from our high school to my son, his comment was, "Well, they'll make great ...'s", meaning, he wouldn't tell his rush chairmen about them - so guys are going to have to come from somewhere:rolleyes:

Maybe, and denying it certainly doesn't do anything to change reality.

But it just seems that groups could approach it more like individuals do, it seems to me. If there's a person that I think I might enjoy knowing, I don't elect not to do stuff with them because they have friends I'm not crazy about. I might choose not to go to the same event as the friends I don't like that much, but I wouldn't say, well, I can't associate with you because I'm going to catch your friends' uncoolness.

I understand that the reputations are apparently all interlocked, but it seems like if you had confidence in your group's being good, you could risk it.

Exactly. And it is important for that discussion to happen because every big Greek system, including mine, has low tier chapters which give out bids the first time you walk in the door- and a LOT of people new to the rush process fall for that and commit to something far less than what they thought or were suitable for.

The typical pattern is to get a huge pledge class knowing a lot of them will quit and go somewhere else in a future semester- and that sucks for the rushees who were not advised in advance what to watch out for and who to be suspicious about when a bid comes too fast (and it is ALWAYS suspicious when a bid is extended on a first visit.)

The other common trap is for guys to get sold on the "closeness and better brotherhood" of a small chapter where everyone knows each other- with the lie being that small size is automatically better than large. Another good way to sucker a rushee in who has not done his homework.

And of course a lot of the low tiers will talk in rush about how they "plan" to have a mixer with a top tier sorority that fall. Not all of them do, but it sure is a common tactic in chapters with inferiority complexes.

This is why tier discussions can be important in my opinion. They make it clear to candidates that there are vast differences in the houses and let them know when they here the big talk during rush who is telling the truth and who is feeding them a line to sucker them into pledging.

For me, it's not the listing or the rankings themselves that make me wonder about who is doing them. It's that I would honestly hope that people in really good groups have something better to do during the regular year. A little posting seems normal. Posting as frequently as say I do here in the summer, would indicate that you didn't have much of a life which wouldn't be the mark of a top tier social life to me.

I can see why we discourage posting tiers, especially for girls here, because it's just going to result in big arguments and for girls, I really do think it does a disservice to the system overall because of the way recruitment works for girls.

The way that groups are expected to take quota and typically not go over does funny things to the process, as does the huge size of the groups and the potential for all the members to want to bring in their friends while they don't actually have room for them. If you tell girls in advance to sort of write off a bunch of groups, you basically might be setting them up for complete failure since you don't know what their relative strength will be compared to the whole pool of PNMs. And if a bunch of girls drop out or recruitment, that affects the number of girls that top groups can take, so it can hurt all the groups no matter what tier they are because they get to take fewer of the girls that they actually want to give bids to.

And we probably disagree about this, but I don't think there are that many groups where a girl is actually better off not joining at all than joining if that's the bid she ends up with.

With guys, the groups rush and offer bids in the summer, control their own size, have spring and fall pledge classes if they want, and feel absolutely no pressure to take a certain number of guys. A guy can get multiple bids and choose among them. So a good candidate seems to have a lot more control over ending up at a higher tier group if the group wants him. So for guys, it would seems that posting tiers does a lot less harm to the guys rushing and to the system overall.

ETA: EE-BO, I actually find discussion of tiers really interesting and I suspect that even the people who post stuff like "only you will know the best group for you" rhetoric know that tiers exists. And with guys, it may not do any harm to talk about tier and even do some good for guys coming in. But, and this could just be my bias based on where my group was in the tiers while I was in college, I think it's different for girls since the process is so different and since the focus of NPC is kind of creating an even playing field in numbers. And there's a really big difference of every group giving bids the same day and each girl only getting one. On some level if the point is about helping PNMs, meaningful girl tiers could just be of two ranks: accept your bid or try to re-rush. But I don't think any member of a NPC group is publicly going to label a group as "try to re-rush" because we all know that at some campus it's our group in that position and a lot of us sincerely want to see all the groups succeed.

Hi srmom,

The impact has been felt at all levels, and it goes hand in hand with the housing issues facing fraternities at Texas.

Overall IFC membership is down from pre-Hopwood days (Hopwood was the name of the court case that eventually led to the 10% rule for anyone not familiar with the story.)

That, combined with much higher housing costs, has cut down greatly on the number of viable fraternities at Texas who own homes- and even more on the overall number of IFC groups (though the emergence of new Greek councils covering other GLO systems keeps the overall number fairly consistent.)

When I was in school, the top 5 or 6 fraternities consistently kept their numbers in the 150-180 range with the largest house being over 200. And top mid tier houses like mine typically ran from 80-100 guys.

As of this spring, only 5 chapters at Texas have over 100 guys- with the top head count being 168 (I have 10 years of IFC data sitting in front of me, hence my ability to be so specific- though I prefer to not name chapters.)

In Fall 2002, IFC totals were nearly 2,000 with 84 being the average chapter size. Today the figure is just under 1,500 with 68 the average chapter size.

Smaller chapters find it harder to cover housing costs in an environment where property taxes have risen as much as 400% since 2004 when the rezoning went into effect and land values skyrocketed. That is easing up some now, but some chapters now face property taxes over $100,000 a year- over $200,000 in one case.

Right now I think 4-5 smaller chapters are in serious financial trouble (my personal estimate based on their size and housing costs), but there are also some serious recolonization efforts going on since Texas is a campus where most fraternities want a strong presence. So it is hard to know if the overall number will go down as I expect, but it is certainly incredibly expensive now for anyone to own property and a surprising number of chapters here are renting at the moment.

In the big picture, the top tier houses will be fine. Their GPAs are incredible- over the all UT men's average and in the low 3.0 range. UT has always had special arrangements with top private schools to admit students based on class rank and SAT score without regard to a 10% threshold and it is my understanding those agreements are still in place though more stringent. So students from top private schools- a key source of rushees for top houses- have a harder time getting into UT than before, but it is not quite the crapshoot it is for most students.

Overall the change at UT has been good for Greek life. While I disagree strongly with the 10% rule and think it should go back to being an applicant-based consideration with high school quality mattering a great deal, the fact is that UT is overall a far more serious institution academically in terms of the student body.

At fraternities this has meant higher GPAs, a desire to keep as many pledges as possible and not chase them off with excess "activities" and also a great reduction in the amount of time that goes into party builds and other stuff that could interfere with academics.

Most of the serious hazing and RM incidents you see today are from the smaller and newer GLOs, some of them "fringe" groups with no real organized national leadership. The more established GLOs are far more responsible and civilized places since that party crowd with bad grades cannot get into UT anymore. This also, I think, explains the apparent rise in serious incidents at nearby public universities which are easier to get into and where a lot of those guys now have to go since UT is not an option.

Long story short- Greek Life at UT is going to be fine. 5 years from now I expect there will be fewer chapters and those chapters will be larger in size. And at the top levels, there will be little- if any- change assuming there are not any major incidents.