Large vs Small chapters
 

Since I went to a small school, our chapters were small. We had seven sororities on campus, all between 35-60 women (total was 60 at that time, now it is 50) one was around 15 women...

My class was considered large, we had 4 through formal, 4 through COB and then, since our NM program was 4 weeks, we took a second group each semester, they were the part two of our class, there were 2 of them. Total of 10 in my class.

Now, as I am wasting time looking at bid day pictures, I am seeing classes of 60-100 women and thinking HOLY CRAP. That CLASS is larger than my CHAPTER.

Do you know all of the women in your CHAPTER? or even your CLASS?

At schools with such large groups, is there a reason they don't make the chapters smaller and then expand to have more chapters?

Don't get me wrong, I look at bid day pictures and videos and think "Wow, that would have been awesome to run with the other new members and see such a large group looking for me!"

Also, how does it work to select new members? How do you remember everyone? How does everyone get to meet all of the PNMs? My mind is boggled with such a large group!

These are things going through my mind during the super bowl.

I'm from IU, but my chapter expanded beyond our bed quota during my junior and senior years. We took a PC of 80something this year, and it is really a full-time job.

I can't talk about the selection part, obviously, as that's MSS

It takes time to remember everyone, and sometimes you still get girls confused. I had moments where I was like shit...I know you. I know you, I KNOW YOU WHY CAN'T I REMEMBER YOUR NAME?!?! You gradually meet them, we have 'Lion Links' so one active is assigned to one new member each week or two, that helps, and then you go out to dinner with other lion links and you gradually get to know them in small groups. It really is a challenge, but you do it. Comes in handy when you join new offices and have to learn names :)

There are obviously pros and cons of small and large chapters, but at campuses with sorority-owned (as opposed to University-owned) housing, filling the house is critical. At places like my alma mater (Illinois), this gets harder and harder every year that the non-Greek options get better. Lots of women only want to live in the chapter house for one year, so you have to effectively have a pledge class each year that is large enough to fill the house when they are sophomores.

So how would a campus make more groups colonize so that there are fewer members? If it's a campus that typically has only NPC chapters, there is a finite number of them. If you take huge Greek campuses like in the SEC and others, there may be 18-20 groups. The remaining ones of the 26 may not want to be there, may not have the resources, etc. You can't just "make" more groups appear in order to lower chapter sizes

I'm not saying "MAKE" I was just saying why doesn't that happen? I was just thinking as I was watching the game... not trying to cause controversy.

Huge chapters are just so far from what I came from, it really is hard for me to fathom a greek system that is as large as my entire school population.

There are a few schools where they're going to have to start begging some of the NPHC or other non-NPC sororities to get involved because they are just maxed out. Obviously IU is in that category, but really Alabama is pretty close to maxed out. I am surprised that there hasn't been a taker at Bama yet. While it would be VERY expensive to colonize there, it seems like you could amortize out those costs pretty quickly. My guess is Arkansas will give the 2 new chapters 2 years to settle in and they'll add 2 more. They have enough interest to probably take on all of the NPC (not that I'm advocating that). And I don't think the trend toward interest in sororities is going away any time soon. I'm in the camp that it's a direct result of kids having every moment of their lives planned and organized.

Because it is very expensive to colonize anywhere much less at one of the larger schools. You have the PR process the semester before colonization. Then you have the colonization process which takes 6 or more executive office/national office people (many more if it's an Alabama or the like) and housing them for about 2 weeks. Then you have the consultants who have to live with them for a semester or two. Then you have housing. Our house at Alabama that we just moved into last fall after one year on campus cost $8 million. No one gives that to you. And all that's jsut for starters. It's a very expensive process and not a step that groups take lightly.

60 girls in my new member class and about 200 in my chapter when I was in school. I knew everyone. Was I BFF with them all? Certainly not. But the same would have been true in a group of 30.

FWIW, I really enjoyed being part of a large chapter. Girls came from all different backgrounds and majors, we had a ton of talent to choose from for Homecoming skits and intramural sports, and a lot of different interests represented in various campus activities. :)

It also made it easy to pick and choose what you wanted to do. We were small when I joined and big when I graduated. When we were small, I felt pressure to have my hands in everything. Had to be in skits, on the IM team, do other philanthropies, hold an office, etc. etc. When we were large, I could do things I was truly passionate about and put 100% into those things

I am from a larger chapter, but advised a small chapter so I could see the pros and cons of both. The biggest pro for large chapters is that you have lots of members to share the load. Also, it's not detrimental to the chapter to have members with varying levels of involvement. We had sisters who never took leadership roles, performed in skits, etc but they did pay their bills on time, went to class and had great GPAs. In the small chapter I advised, this type of involvement was often looked down upon. I always had to remind the EC that it takes all types of members for a chapter to be successful.

The biggest pro for the small chapter was how easy it was to get to know everyone. During recruitment it was easy to find girls who would have things in common with the PNM because they really knew their sisters.

It is true that in a smaller chapter, you do end up doing A LOT.

In my honorary, at one time down to 8 members when I was there, it was HARD. Once we added 16 new members in one semester, things got a lot easier.

Honestly, I would LOVE to have had a year in a HUGE chapter with a HUGE house. Our house was an old converted farm house that when I was there held 19 women (with one single.) However, we often had 2-4 singles. They now have made a lot of the rooms singles (which is good, because there were some SMALL doubles!) We had a decent living room, a regular old kitchen, a single bathroom downstairs (5 rooms downstairs on main level,) and a 3 toilet/2 shower/3 sink bathroom upstairs. We had laundry, huge storage and a nice sized chapter room downstairs. We had one of the nicest houses on campus. (I believe the ZTA house was an old dorm? 33girl, I need you on that one!) They held more women than we did.

Id LOVE to even go walk inside a large chapter house. Anyone know of any LARGE Phi Sig houses, or large houses near DC that wouldn't mind a random old person walking through oohing and ahhing?!

See, I'm the opposite. I was in school at a time when it was NOT cool to be Greek, when we had people "depledging" and "deactivating" left and right. We had far fewer members my senior year than my freshman. Our chapter ultimately closed because of it...and because of our inability to support the physical house with those numbers.
So I keep thinking that it's all going to swing the other way any minute.

My college has ceiling set at 40 now, it was 35 in the fall though. They only raised it a week before informal spring recruitment. I personally love having a small chapter because I know every girl well. Then again, my college is tiny (I would say about 800 students) so having a large sorority is improbable.

Because of this concern, if I were to colonize, at, say, Bama, I would NOT recommend building the biggest house on campus. Average house size max. Nicest? Maybe, but not the biggest. But with the way some of these schools are going, they have a LONG way to go before the membership can't maintain the structure.

When I was in school (in the 80's) my school was in a colony blitz. All of the chapters that extended failed within 10 years. But the numbers were not there, and pre-RFM the success of chapters was very lopsided. At least 5 of 15 chapters were not at (or even near) total, and yet they brought on a 16th. I don't think any school would do something like that now. And I think that's another reason to hold out hope for continued growth. RFM makes the whole process fair and my guess is chapter failure is down considerably. I don't know the numbers, however.

But I do agree that that's probably why some schools have allowed their chapters to become freakishly large - fear that it's the high point of the bell curve.

To preface: my pledge class was right around 54 and total was around 130 I believe. It grew throughout my collegiate years.

I knew everyone by face, name, year, majors (usually) and typically something about them. It really depended on if they were at the house often. When I was a senior, I graduated early. I didn't get to know that pledge class as well as I wanted, but I still got to know them fairly well. I knew the seniors, juniors and sophomores when I pledged very well. I also knew the juniors and sophomores when I graduated very well. I could tell you the life story of almost everyone in PC. This is where I think living in is important. If you have a smaller chapter, it is easier to get everyone together other than at mandatory events. In larger chapters, it is always a struggle. If there is a common structure, people come over for meals, studying, hanging out etc. You end up hanging out with sisters you normally wouldn't without the shared structure either because you live together or convenience.

I think the question could flip as well. Why have a bunch of small groups instead of having larger? Yes, there are different personalities, but at the same time, are the groups that different? As I got older, I really felt that I would have been comfortable with any group on my campus. I would have developed differently than I did, but I still feel like I would have done just as well.

I feel like a small group would have been nice. If you aren't an outgoing person it can be easy to feel lost sometimes.

I'm not sure how to answer without going into membership selection. I will try my best to still answer. On pref night/bid day, I met women that we were thinking of bidding or had extended a bid, whose names I had only heard a few times and had never met. I trusted my sisters to know the chapter and to know what was best for the chapter. Every year this seemed to work out really well for us. This is also why GCers recommend that new members stick it out for a few weeks if they didn't like their bid because at the larger chapters a PNM really only meets a small portion of the chapter. This also probably plays into why it took me two years to realize that the chapters on my campus really weren't that different. You get 130 college women in a room and there is a spectrum. You add the filter of being interested in sororities and the spectrum narrows. I can almost guarantee that the distribution of women from that spectrum in the chapters might be different, but that all areas would be represented. Sure XYZ may have more cheerleaders, but ABC has a couple too. This also might be different in the SEC. I really can only speak for my campus, but it has been echoed, more or less, from others as well.

I went to college in the mid-70s, at a small selective school that had just a couple of years before closed its "womens" college and recognized us as equal. We had five chapters; the largest was about 40, and total enrollment of women was probably under 1000. My chapter was about 20 the year I was president -- yep, we knew everyone. We might not have been close, but then I have biological sisters that I'm closer to than others. Total was in the 50s, but no one approached it, and no one bothered to re-set it; what would have been the point? (Today, the chapters are large, another has been added, and chapter size is approximately 100, but it's also 40 years later.)

I've spoken to other women at similar schools during the same time. We can recall the bid days when you gave out a dozen bids and prayed some would be accepted. One of my pledge sisters got bids from both us and Chi Omega and had to decide; few of the Chi Os spoke to her for the next couple of years. (We did not have a today-style rush, obviously.) MOST of the greeks on campus were first-generation greeks.

So I've been reading GC for a few years now and learned my experience was not typical of today's student, even at the small schools. GC has helped me to write recs (though I've probably done fewer than half a dozen in 40 years) and has definitely helped me to understand my alumnae sisters better - many of them had the big-chapter experience that is completely foreign to me.

But I've had questions similar to those AngelPhiSig. I can't imagine a chapter of 50 or more, much less 200 (and I've never been able to figure out if total is 250, and you pledge 100 each year, where the other 150 went). I've been thinking a lot depends on where you *choose* to go to school. Someone who chooses SEC is probably in a very different place socially than someone who chooses a small private college, and looking for very different experiences (my chapter never once went to a football game). The sororities reflect that.

Total isn't a "cap" on membership like quota is a cap on bids. It's a number derived at from the average chapter size on campus with consideration given to how many are way below that and how many are way above. The only time total comes into consideration at all is if a chapter is below total after recruitment, they can recruit (COB) up to total - not just quota. This allows the smaller chapters the chance to grow to a size more in line with the others on campus. Otherwise, they would only be allowed to pledge quota and would never have a mechanism in place to grow to met the size of the others.

Angel, The Beta Alpha chapter house at University of Maryland is GORGEOUS! Not too far from you, either.

As a regional official, I learned how all sizes of chapters operated, from one that had about 17 to one that had around 150. They operate about the same. They all have the same types of members, they all do the same types of things, just in different proportions.
A big chapter will have an officer for every aspect. For instance, a big chapter might have a chairman of swap T shirts and another chairman for other kinds of T shirts. A very small chapter would have a vice president: finance whose duties included ordering T shirts.

Alabama has chapters with about 280 members each - a couple have 300. Even the new houses can't seat all those members at dinner at one time. Heck, there are restaurants out there that don't have that many customers all day, but the sorority house kitchen is expected to feed that many 3 squares a day? I can't wrap my mind around it.
But with that many members, not all of them are going to be there at any one time, just like all church members are not all at church at any one time. A certain percentage is going to be out for an excused absence. The proportion is roughly the same as when we were a chapter of 50.

I see I'm the only man, but yeah I can't believe the size of some chapters I've seen, or the houses. Every time I walk down Greek Row here I am jealous of the houses. Then again I'm part of a chapter that just turned 13 this last year. So even our alumni only number about 100-150. I have met at least a third of the alumni of my chapter, so I can't imagine the chapters that have been around for over a hundred years.

I understand that. (I presume you were responding to my point). But since no one ever reached total, and at the time we didn't worry about all the chapters being the same size, or quotas, total was simply an abstract concept that had somehow been set. I'd bet 90% of my chapter sisters couldn't have told you what it was or what it meant. I wouldn't either, if not for reading here on GC.

Yeah, I think I need to go visit!!! :)

I went to a large university in the early 80's where the Greek system had only just come back on campus a couple of years prior (although my chapter had been able to maintain a small off campus presence during the "banned" years). Our total at the time I rushed was only 48 and my pledge class was only 7 (things have significantly changed size wise now, however). Our house held 12 women.

When my daughter chose a university whose chapters have pledge classes of 50+, I couldn't imagine what that would be like. I have enjoyed living vicariously through her to see some of the differences. There are definitely positives and negatives to both, but I have to admit that I think, for me, the larger chapter size positives outweigh the negatives.

I feel like I could have written the same post. When I pledged my sorority in the early 80's our total was 60 and my pledge class was 15 girls. I knew them all very well.

My daughter's new member class this fall was made up of 130 girls...more than twice my chapter's total! I still can't wrap my head around the fact that they have well over 300 actives present at their chapter meetings.

I completely agree that there are positive and negatives to both. Both have different experiences to offer, based on similar ideas, and big or small, I doubt any of us would trade our experiences for anything. :)

My pledge class this year was 112..and chapter totals around 300 I think (South Carolina). Alpha Gamma Delta colonized this Fall and it was just announced yesterday that Pi Beta Phi will be colonizing in Fall 2014 and Alpha Xi Delta in 2016. I will be long gone by the time Alpha Xi Delta gets to my campus but I am so excited to see the pledge classes get smaller at USC. While I feel like I know the majority of the girls in my chapter, it would be so much nicer to have pledge classes in the 60-80 range rather than 100+.

and here's where "relative" becomes glaringly obvious. Most people here would say 60-80 seems freakishly large ;)

Yes, it was an old dorm. They held the most women (52 as opposed to 14-16 for the rest of the sorority houses) BUT the bedrooms themselves were postage stamp sized AND most of the members had to buy meal plans (a lot of the reason of moving off campus, which our houses were, was to not have to eat caf food anymore) since only upperclassmen had kitchen privileges due to the amount of people living in the house. Since Ali and I were in school, the ZTAs are no longer in this house and the largest sorority house (D Phi E's) is more like a block of apartments - I'm not sure how they do the common area, the last time I was in it it was a fraternity house and scary.

Anyway - I can't imagine living in a large house with a cook, specific mealtimes, etc. To me it just seems like prolonging being under your parents' roof. Part of the good thing about our Greek houses was living on your own, eating when you wanted, etc etc. I guess it's all in what you are used to.

Living in a house with maids, a cook, house boys (that's what we called them. I think others call them waiters or something else) is great. I'm really glad I appreciated it while I had it. And no, it's not like living with your parents. It's not like living in the dorms or an apartment either, so I suppose too hard to describe if you haven't lived it. But my chapter house held 60 (and I think now they say it holds 50) in actual bedrooms - no cold air. It seems foreign to me to have 100+ and cold air.

Retention
 

Lane Swerve...

So if you have NM classes of 100+ and chapter size is 310ish. Wouldn't chapter size be 400ish? What happened to the 100 members that left? That is a drop out rate of 25%. What is being done to retain members? Sure we can say that part is finances, some don't like sorority life. But 100 members is HUGE! Then again, 25% is huge. I wish that this board would address membership retention more. I realize that it walks the line on membership selection, internal chapter operations, etc.

End of Lane Swerve...

From what little nosing around I've done, I think member retention is kind of a big problem these days. If we lost a single pledge or had 1 sister not come back to school in the fall, it was a HUGE deal. Now it seems like a handful or more is completely expected.

That is exactly the part I don't get. I don't think it's treading the MS line. I know there have been some people on here who say that at their school, Greek is something you are gung ho on as a sophomore, junior year it's ok, and if you're a senior and still involved it's uncool.

And this isn't even telling the whole story - I'm sure there are girls who just pay their dues and fines and only show up to the bare minimum to stay an active and not get called in front of standards because they want to go to mixers and meet men, or because being able to say "I'm an XYZ alum" is advantageous socially after graduation. It's doubtful they really understand what sisterhood is, other than a means to a social end.

I'd like it to be that chapters aren't lauded/penalized for making/not making quota, but rather for their retention rate. I have no doubt that some of the chapters that are getting bitched at after every recruitment would all of a sudden be the fair-haired girls, and vice versa.

Your chapter was aware that football games existed, though. LOL. (I'm exaggerating, all the Greeks had members in band/front/majorettes, the football team and cheerleaders...although block seating would have resulted in many many empty blocks.)

While I was there, I don't *think* any of my sisters ever attended one; we had no band members, no cheerleaders, and no one affiliated with the athletic department. One sister was a buggy driver, but buggy is VERY specific to CMU. Football was simply not something much of the campus paid attention to. One of the school's chapters had a number of sisters who dated guys from one fraternity -- the one with the most football players, and they attended.

I simply use football to illustrate the relative priorities of the different campuses, and that when your entire chapter is 20-40 women, the chapters really can have entirely different personalities, where women really may find they don't fit in a few of them. Now that the chapter sizes at that school are over 100, perhaps the distinction isn't as pronounced.

In those huge chapters, they may need to find a way to sort of transition them to half-alumnae status to keep them involved without asking more of them than they're willing to do. For instance, if they lived in, held an office, participated in X number of events over the last 2 years, always paid their bills on time, was never on academic probation (there are a litany of options here singly or in combination), then they only have to attend chapter once a month as a senior, or they don't have to attend any social functions, or they aren't obliged to do service hours, or whatever would keep them in the fold without overwhelming their senior year. Those of us who were collegiate members for 4 years and lived in for 3 can certainly appreciate the appeal of not having so much chapter responsibility as you prepare for graduation and the real world.

There might also need to be some social training for all collegians that when the going gets tough, quitting is not the answer. Or boredom isn't a sufficient reason to dump a commitment.

This is an OK idea, as long as it doesn't evolve to 1) pushing out women who DO want to be involved senior year/making senior year involvement "weird" 2) causing women to overload just for the sole purpose of being able to blow off everything senior year and still call themselves sisters.

Not only that, there are majors in which your junior year classes can often be WAY more time consuming than senior year classes, judging by how you're able to schedule things.

I'd rather see this as something chapters initiate locally rather than nationally mandated - the chapter that has pledge classes of 100 every year may find some merit in this. The chapter that has pledge classes of 10 will be crippled by it.

And a small chapter may not have the luxury of doing without some of its sisters.

I wholeheartedly agree with you, DubaiSis. Our chapter was not huge at all (usually ~25 members), but they could have afforded to have 3-5 of us not there all the time. I can say for those people applying to grad school, there are far more important things to be doing than mini-golfing or whatever the exchange is. I understand that you would want senior members there at meetings because they will have the most experience and therefore may be able to offer a solution that younger members hadn't considered. By my last semester, I was focused on the fact that I was moving 5,000km away and that I needed to start researching sources for my thesis, not on random events. Obviously, some events like COR and philanthropy need to have members there, and I think that those should not fall by the wayside. However, social and sisterhood are a different matter. Some of my favourite memories are from sisterhood events, but watching "Insert chickflick movie here" a month before I graduated was not going to make/break my experience. Ditto for exchanges, if I haven't met these people before now, it's probably not the end of my life.

I know that Alpha Gam does have provisions for seniors, and the Delta programming (I'm assuming other orgs do as well), but sometimes younger members need to try to understand what graduating members are going through outside of the chapter.

Oh absolutely. Just as we've discussed the variations on Alumnae chapters, the collegiate chapters also have to run differently, including the number of activities and the number of offices held. As it is, I think a lot of chapters would be surprised at what the minimum requirements are to be a real chapter. And if the house isn't full, you have to live in. That's just how it goes - bills have to be paid. But if you have the freedom to limit the responsibilities of the seniors (still, president is pretty much always going to be a senior, isn't it?) I think that would help. And for the heavy junior load, maybe there could be a 1 semester "off" type policy, if you can justify it and you've done your part up to the one killer semester. AND a few people being off the radar won't affect the chapter as a whole.

There might a benefit as well to a KROS (seniors) program.

We did the following for seniors:

1) No more door/phone duty
2) Senior events, like exchanges (mixers) or happy hours at 21+ venues
3) A special senior/phi event so the seniors got to know the new members
4) A senior chair in charge of planning 2 and 3

It's less about course load and more about the fact that nobody cared, by senior year, about going to fraternity exchanges and stuff like that. You have your group of friends who you want to hang out with, and you don't need to meet random dudes once/month. I would say that this was mostly fourth-year seniors, though. For women who pledged as sophomores, and were thus in their third year as a senior, it was common to still live in the house.

I would say, across campus, a soph/jr president was just as common as a jr/sr president.

I suspect that in most cases, these 300 plus chapters are over campus total even after members quit or become alumnae. Also, the chapter may not hear much about retention from their HQ simply because HQ knows that these "mega" chapters are likely to have retention issues. Yes 25% is a huge amount and I am sure the HQs desire to retain everyone. But I am guessing it would be difficult to develop specific retention programs for these “mega” chapters - especially in the cases where campus expansion is possible and thus more manageable chapters.

Frankly, I wouldn’t know where to begin to address retention issues for such large chapters.