Attitude of Students @ Your School Toward Sorority Rush
 

Question, what attitude do students @ your school have toward sorority recruitment?

Example: At ABC University, being Greek is like being a celebrity. When young women pledge, they are told to always put their best face on b/c all the other young women are watching them and looking up to them as goddesses of all that is cool. Women clammor over themselves to speak to Greeks in their classes and spend all summer preparing for the Super Bowl that is fall recruitment.

OR

At XYZ College- Greeks are the scum of the Earth. Other young women wouldn't rush if their lives depended on it b/c being Greek basically= being the stereotypical, pretty, snotty, spoiled brat. Students would feel a whole lot better if Greeks were eradicated from campus.

Which attitude do the students on your campus mostly have? Is it a mixture of both? I hope this makes sense :)

Rush at IU, at least sorority rush, is huge and hypercompetitive. Around 1800 girls go through every year and less than half of those get bids.

Seems like it's time for expansion, yes ?? that's really sad only half get bid... are people dropping themselves after certain houses drop them or are they not matching ?


My school it's pretty much the "you're paying for your friends, you do nothing but party, I'm going to get hazed" attitude. Tables are set up in the quad at the beginning of every semester and we hand out flyers about open house and take sign ups for rush... and half the girls that walk by give us dirty looks, some one actually said F^*( no I'm not taking your flyer" to a girl the other day, but much more typical response is "I'm not interested" or "Ummm, no" with a look of disdain.

Glitter, that still is the same old statement from many of the Not So Greek Campi. Buying your Friends. How sad that these people have no idea what being a Member of a GLO is really like.:

If that is true, then I am doing something wrong for 40 years( :eek:

Greeks seem to go through periods of ups and downs especially at Mid and small size Schools. A lot has to do with the atmosphere of the College itself.

It seems like more Schools are having a reversal in theory from Shorter College in Rome Ga. all locals, to promoting Nationals. Many larger schools building Greek Housing.

We can only hope I gues!:)

My school is a sub-variant of the second group. Sororities are unrecognized and unhoused, so many students are only dimly aware that they exist. If a Greek's affiliation comes up in conversation with a non-Greek, she'll almost apoligize for it ("Yeah, I'm in Delta Gamma -- it's not really like a sorority though, we mostly do charity fundraisers and stuff.") Most women wouldn't rush if their lives depended on it because sororities are seen as anti-feminist, absurdly backwards, and generally counter to what the university is about. The culture of the school is that in your free time you ought to be writing speeches for Hillary Clinton or composing symphonies or starting up a dot-com, not (shocked, contemptuous stare) rushing a sorority.

It runs the gamut. Some women really admire the sororities - they're usually the ones who end up rushing, naturally. Others could take it or leave it - they'll go to charity fundraisers etc., but aren't interested in joining a sorority themselves because they're more interested in other clubs and activities. A few are bitterly anti-sorority... one year a few people stationed themselves at a point where the recruitment groups had to walk by, and they stood there and went "moooo... moooo..." :rolleyes:

I think the story with IU is that they are on a November-January recruitment schedule. When the PNMs go through round 1 in November, the freshmen have no grades and no GPA yet. They finish the semester and get their grades, and then the sororities will cut anyone who doesn't meet their GPA requirements. If a PNM's GPA is very low, she will be dropped from recruitment entirely. At most schools, where recruitment takes place during a period of a few days, PNMs will know their GPA going in, and if it's too low they just won't register in the first place.

aephi alum, is that a statement for defered rush?

I am used to Fall Recruitment where I have been.

Sometimes I think that would be good, but at others not so sure?

Guess it would depend on the school and the Greek System.

RU is a pretty small school, and when I was there the formal recruitment numbers were going down, I think in 2002 only like 180 women even went through. We had 7 orgs and total was somewhere like 60 or 70. For the number of women we had we were also very visible. People wore letters everyday (I must have had about 100 sets when I passed), then I would go next door to VA Tech and no one wore letters unless there was some event.

Hmmmm....I am not to sure that many girls know about recruitment at The University of Akron. If you refer to ADPiAkron's and Hannahgirl's recruitment thread on recruitment stories you can see that only 60 girls (at a school with 19,000 undergrads) have signed up!

Northern Arizona University is a pretty anti-greek campus... about 5% of the women are greek, and the other 95% would never consider going greek... Much of this has to do with stereotypes, and the fact that the university does not greatly back greek life...

That is a big part of it. But there are also a lot of women who drop out because they aren't comfortable with the houses they're left with (that was me) and still others who don't match. Making it to pref night is no guarantee that you'll get a bid, just because of sheer numbers. (especially true if you're a sophomore, and if you're a junior or above, forget it...I think all the houses have at least a 2-3 year live-in rule and I don't think any of them take juniors or above.)

I agree IU desperately needs to expand. There are 19 sororities and quota is generally between 45-50. So there are about 855-950 bids to be given per year. The problem, from what I understand, is that IU will not let a new sorority come to campus without having a plan for a house, and there just isn't much, if any, available land for houses on campus these days. (Someone from IU can tell me if I have this wrong!) There are some vacant houses, since a few chapters have been closed, but those houses are either still owned by the fraternity (with plans to recolonize) or are sold to the University or to other organizations. (The Alpha Sig house was sold recently to a Christian group, the Pike house is being sold...I think to IU but I could be wrong. The old AOPi house was sold to IU and now houses the School of Informatics.)

This doesn't seem to be a problem for the fraternities, though. Several have colonized or recolonized recently and are unhoused.

Nope. I'm used to fall recruitment too, and I prefer it. Back in the day, we had immediate fall formal recruitment in August, and for first-semester freshmen we (all the sororities) based our GPA cuts on the PNMs' high school GPAs.

Good academic performance in high school doesn't necessarily mean good academic performance in college. We addressed this by setting the bar higher for high school GPAs. IU has addressed this by having what is essentially a deferred recruitment, with the difference being that the first round takes place before the PNMs have their grades - so the PNMs can't self-select and say "I don't have the minimum GPA for any of the sororities, so I'm going to skip rush and work on bringing up my GPA."

Ah... got it.

Is it possible for a colonizing sorority to arrange to rent a house? e.g. It's 2004 and sorority ABC wants to colonize. Fraternity XYZ has a closed chapter, owns that chapter's house, and is planning to recolonize, but not until 2007. ABC rents the house for 3 years while looking for their own house to buy and saving up for a down payment. By 2007 ABC has found a house and they move in, and XYZ gets their house back as a house for their new colony. It would get expensive for ABC, though.

How did you do this at such a selective school? I'm surprised that any PNM's had high school records that were less than stellar.

Actually, this is not just a NIC But and NIC, NHPC or a MHTC post.

So, what is the idea if any for Members of the Greek Community to turn the figures around.:confused:

The problem is not each posters alone but all of ours. How do We as Greeks Change The Perception?:)

Maybe go outside the box for recruiting?:D

Hello, art thou in a rut?

This is the way We have always done it? Why not change? Dont be The In We are the ones, dont pretend to be the ones?

You are not part of the Crowd, get more interested in being the Crowd! The people who do things.

Show what you do, be high profile and ask others to join in.

Charity Events are great for profile!:cool:

Very few, if any, freshman PNMs were cut for grades. ;) We all established minimum HS GPAs anyway.

My school has now gone to deferred recruitment. The first semester of your freshman year is pass/no record (if you get a C or better, you pass, otherwise there's no record you ever took the course). I believe that grade-related cuts for freshmen are now based on how many courses they passed during their first semester.

I know people with stellar HS records who nonetheless failed most or all of their freshman classes. From that standpoint, maybe deferred rush is better, because there is real college experience to base a GPA decision on, and you don't end up in a situation where a new member comes in on the strength of her HS GPA, gets initiated (no one holds for grades anymore), then just can't make grades.

This is one of the reasons I agree with Deferred Recruitment. Doing well in HS is completely different from doing well in college--especially during the first semester.

IvySpice, that sounds just like my school. The only difference is that we're recognized.

NC State has 29,000 students and about 400 go through recruitment with 6 sororities on campus. Chapter totals are about 100.

The school has large engineering and agriculture programs, therefore the sorority life is a little small if you know what I mean! Most of the PNM's that stay in recruitment until the end get a bid even if it isn't for their top choice. We try to match as many as possible.

If girls on campus don't go through recruitment, it is basically because they hate greek life. I think greek life and other students are very segregated here at NC State, but we try very hard for it to not be that way.

I co-sign everything said here. I'm at NCSU (well was at NCSU - just graduated) too and it really is kinda a Greek or TOTALLY NOT Greek attitude. I did a lot of work with the Greek Life office last summer and this summer to talk about Recruitment with rising freshmen and it was kinda all of nothing - they knew they wanted to rush right from the start or they didn't even want to hear anything about it.

We are trying hard though with big PR to get more girls interested. It helps that we've done so much expansion, and are continuing to do so.

At Ohio State the general attitude toward the Greek system is pretty much one of indifference. It's so disappointing that OSU is the second largest university in the country with about 50,000 students yet has a measley Greek population of about 2,500. That's about 5%. Last year we had approx. 600 girls sign up for formal recruitment and only about 300 actually went through.:( It def doesn't help that we have deferred recruitment and a cap on the total number of members that can be in a chapter of 100 people.

I guess at such a large institution with so many organizations and activities the Greek system just doesn't get the attention that it deserves so many students just don't care about fraternities and sororities. Such a shame.

My school has no greek life...
 

but there are a lot of greeks who transfered in from other schools. Out side of them(us), there really is no interest in bringing greek life to our campus. My school has a high concentration of international students who could care less about the concept of greek life. I wear my nalia' and the looks I get range from utter confusion:confused: to rolling eyes.:rolleyes: It's no big deal here.

When I was at New Paltz, the majority population of students were "artsy hippie types" and VERY anti-Greek. I was up there last year though, and the orgs seem to be getting bigger and attracting more members. Unfortunately I don't think any new GLO's have come into existence and last year someone on the school paper wrote a very negative (stereotypical) editorial bashing Greek life at the school. I think in general, wherever you go, in whatever part of the country, you will either be for or against Greek life. Like any other type of committment, a very small percentage of the overall student population will probably end up completing then sticking with an org anyways. For the schools that get a huge turnout, I also think they have a huge student body as well, and if you have houses and a "Greek Row" that is very different than a small school where Greek life is not as recognized or supported.

At SIUE, the general attitude seems to be mostly of ambivalence to Greek Life. Less than 4% of the students are Greek out of an enrollment of 13,500. We typically get around 80-100 women who sign up for recruitment and quota is usually mid-20s. The majority of our students are commuters, and really aren't interested in any activities. The people who go Greek typically live on campus or are the real
gung-ho type who want a traditional collegiate experience. I have also heard a lot of people who have said that if we had Greek housing, they would be more interested in joining.

UK has Fall Recruitment & also bases any GPA cut from the PNM's high school GPA. Any girls that are cut from rush because of a GPA are welcome to COB in the Spring after their GPA from first semester is established.

Recruitment @ UK is kind of a "take it or leave it" type thing. A lot of the campus seems pretty apathetic about Greek life but Recruitment always has a lot of girls (usually between 900-1000.)

There is no attitude toward it. At my school it's not anybody's business but the org and the person rushing, so that be the case, who ever goes to the rush is usually kept on the low.

Imperial1

I don't mean to be dumb but what school is IU? And at our school only about 30 girls go through rush and the school is about 17,000 but it is a commuter campus ... i think sororities are def looked down upon. When i went to Ole Miss almost every girl looked up to the girls in sororities and wanted to be in one.

Imperial1, am I correct in thinking that you go to a school that has all or mostly non-NPC/NIC groups?

IU=Indiana University. Not a dumb question!

You are correct. We have NPHC groups as well as illegal auxillary orgs which are TRUELY kept secret because they aren't supposed to be on our campus period.

Imperial1