Are numbers really down?
 

I know this is kinda a stupid question, but here goes.

I know DeltA Sig has been facing declining numbers the last couple years. Our best era was the early to mid nineties when we had 24 STRONG Califonia Chapters and huge chapter selsewhere. Now we only have 9 moderate Cali chapters, and numbers have gone down elsewhere.

So, in 2002/3, have numbers for the Greek Community overall declined? I know SDSU's Greek system has taken a HUGE drop (IFC mostly).

This brings me to two questions:

1) Are numbers down overall?

2) Are we facing a lot more anti-greek sentiment now more than ever, thanks to MTV and many highly publicized media stories?

I know it has at my chapter and at my school we use to have 15 man rushes and now we have problems getting 5 it jsut seems like the greek system isnt looked upon faily because of certain situations and it is our responsibile for us to change

I know at Ohio U only 60 men went through fall recruitment for 17 fraternities. Fortunately, the fraternities were able to attract more men that didn't go through the "formal" process, and they all seemed to do pretty well.

Stan, while this has been brought up many times, it is never brought up enuff times!

Yes, overall, figures have been dropping over all!

Because of Bad press, and the affects on schools, they are getting more hard on greeks for any infraction!

Maybe if some of the Morons get it together and show what We are really about as Greeks it will get back to growing! My Chapter is after a very tuff time!!

Well Stan, what do you think! How about the Rest of You!:confused:

Can't we fight back? Websites, TV spots, something? Something needs to be done to respond to this backlash. People automatically assume my grades have PLUMMETED whenever they find out I've joined Sigs, but they've actually GONE UP! People's perceptions are completely negative, can't we do something to give ourselves a voice? I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be a financial issue, couldn't we collective fight back?

I think it also depends on the modernization. I mean, I feel that more and more freshmans are really individualistic, they don't care about their society and they don't socialize that much anymore. Computer and internet, per say, add into this problem. Look at me, instead of hanging out with my bros now, I sit in front of internet and cruizin' it like non other ...

Back in those old fine days, when all the Playstation 2 and DVDs not the main concern of distraction, men were more depends on how they socialized with other people .. thus the brotherhood bond and all mixed functions with other fraternities/sororities established. Now, instead of knowing people by shaking hands and talk with them, we just sit in front of our computer and chat. They don't need to join GLO to do that!

I understand where everyone is coming from with the numbers thing. My chapter was at one point the biggest sorority on our campus(we also are the first sorority on our campus) and 2 years it ago it got so small that they shut it down for a year and then recolonized it. We now have 50 members and 2 pledges that are soon to be initiates and are looking forward to Spring Recruitment, but our numbers still aren't as good as they could be. Most of the sororities on campus this year had trouble of reaching their quota, but i don't know about the fraternities. I do think it has a lot to do with the way Greek Organizations are seen by the public. We hear so much about how negative sororites and fraternities are, but you rarely hear about us when we do something good for the community or the campus.

Liz
Alpha Xi Delta

The Greek system seems to be tied to our economy and the state of our Union. When things are going great, Greeks are very strong, when there is unrest (the possibilty of war, or actual war, outside our borders or within our own diverse population), the Greek systems sees their numbers drop. This is why we saw so many chapters close in the late '60's to late '70's. The 80's & 90's brought a large expansion both with new chapters and old ones recolonizing. Unfortunately, with the possiblity of war hanging large, and our economy down, we are seeing another repeat in our history and Greek memberships.

DaffyKD

I've only been around for 2 years, but to me, things are going down. When I joined, we really needed new girls, and got 12 new members with my class. That brought the sorority total up to 32 I think (quota is 40). We initiated 21 girls total that year. We were really proud of what we had accomplished. Last year we initiated only 8. This semester we actually initiated 7, but we worked our tail off. We're not losing any seniors next semester (lost 4 this semester to graduation/transferring, but one was alumni anyway), so that should be good, but we will be losing 18 girls within the next year and a half. We got ONE girl during formal recruitment, and only 5 girls total went to Pref Night. Major ouch.

I think queequek has a point. People try to pride themselves on being "independent" and I think people think they're "too good" to go Greek. They've bought into the lies that we choose their friends and tell them what to do.

And in all honesty, I've noticed a lot of people are cheap. Yes, college is getting more and more expensive, so that is probably a big part of it. But I have a hard time getting some of my friends to go out to see a damn movie because they're always complaining that they're broke (maybe if they quit buying so much damn alcohol). I will spend my money for entertainment where it's worthwhile, because I don't like sitting in front of the TV or computer all day.

Maybe it's also because I go to an engineering school and we're all nerds that don't know how to socialize. :p ;)

To put another spin on things . . . rush numbers at my school were up this year, at least for the sororities. I don't know about the fraternities. I think we usually have somewhere between 600-700 rushees and this year there were 800+.

The really low point on our campus came in the 1980s when the sororities got so low in numbers that a couple of chapters that had been here for decades had to be shut down. In the past five years or so, though, sororities have been growing to the point where I think they might even be considering re-colonizing one of those groups.


From reading the posts in the rush forum, it looks like sorority rush numbers were up quite a bit this year at many of the big schools with stronger or bigger Greek systems, but down at a lot of the schools with smaller Greek systems.

another possibility for low numbers
 

HI there,

First off at Cal State Dominguez Hills our greek numbers are growing but that is because the whole Greek system is growing. Our first Greeks weren't even on campus until the 90's.

We have most of the Divine 9 now (not sure of all the names that we have that are actually chartered on campus and how many are city/county wide chapters though).
We have 2 IFC - Sigma Pi and Lambda Theta Phi (also in NALFO from what I understand)
We have one NPC - Phi Sigma Sigma which was chartered on March 24, 2001
and for NALFO sororities we have Sigma Lambda Gamma and Sigma Iota Alpha (which is trying to colonize with campus approval). Plus Kappa Delta Chi is trying to form and interest group (also with campus approval) but I haven't seen them around much yet. Finally there is another group trying to form an interest group but they haven't received approval from Student Life yet.
NALFO fraternities we have Sigma Lambda Beta and Phi Iota Alpha.
We also have one more sorority trying to form an interest group they're national but they're not associated with any of the orgs like IFC, NPHC, and NALFO.

Anyway, CSUDH is a non-traditional commuter campus with the average age of our 13,000 students being between 27 & 29. Many of our students are transfer students and we don't have a huge popluation of Freshman that come and live in housing. A lot of our students work 40 plus hours and quite a few have families. Although we are still considered "nontraditional" from what I've been reading in the Chronicle for Higher Education our example is truly becoming more of the norm for colleges.

If that is the case for many of the Greek schools could it be because they are still trying to recruit the 18 year old freshman while the student population is moving towards 20 something transfer students? I know for most of the Greeks at CSUDH if we pushed for the freshman only we would probably lose a couple of chapters.

My Phi Sigma Sigma chapter is a prime example of what the makeup of our Greek system is like. We are very culturally diverse (of course it helps CSUDH is one of the most diverse campuses west of the Mississippi River). Our age range goes from 18 up to 37. We have Freshman up through Graduate students as Collegiate Members. We have married women, married with family, single with children, and of course the single woman. Because of the differences in life experiences we've had to adjust how we recruit and the activities we do rather then being the stereotypical sorority everyone thinks of. But I think it has made our Chapter stronger and overall has made our Greek system as a whole stronger.

Anyway, could this be part of the problem at schools where numbers are dropping? The student population demographics are changing but the way recruiting is done (or at least viewed as being done) hasn't changed. I mean as a prime example, I know many women are absolutely shocked that I am a 34 year old graduate student active in a sorority as a collegiate member and would never think to have tried to recruit me in the first place. We have 3 grad students now plus a few more that are interested in joining. We have sisters with children and I've come across other Greeks that say their chapter wouldn't even have offered them a bid because of the way the traditional system is at their school - but you're missing out on some quality women there.

Just my thoughts on the subject,
Carolyn

I haven't been around for too long (I'm only a sophomore), and I've only been Greek for a few months. But I can tell you from what I know, the Greek system at my school (at least with the sororities) did much better this year than in the past. Last year, my chapter had 12 new members (I'm pretty sure) and this year it's 36 new members!!

Also, I can tell you the reason my friends and I chose not to go Greek last year. In retrospect it was pretty funny. I was very supportive of fraternities - I practically forced all my guy friends to go to the rush events. But, I wasn't interested at all in sororities. I didn't understand why anyone would want to spend so much time and money on friends that you could have anyway. Also, I think people are right about the "individuality" thing. I saw sororities as the perfect example of almost "mob mentality" - a bunch of girls who look, think, act the same way. Two of my friends DID go through formal recruitment, and they both stopped going after the first round, because they were so turned off by the formality of the whole thing. I became very close with girls from one of the two sororities on our campus after recruitment was over. As time went on, I got pretty mad at myself for not doing recruitment, because they seemed to always have so much fun doing all of their pledging stuff, and were really just cool girls. It wasn't until the end of the year that I decided that I wanted to be a part of it, and I resolved to go through formal recruitment the following year. I did, and actually, I ended up joining the OTHER sorority (funny how things work out...)

So the moral of the story is, I wasn't necessarily anti-Greek. But I was certainly anti-sorority. I guess you could say that I didn't buy into the hype about fraternities (but that might be in part because I was hanging out at one of the frats a lot from day one), but for some reason I DID buy into the hype about sororities. It might be because I'm at a school that's about 78% male, so most girls here tend to get along better with guys. But, I had to really get to know those girls before I understood that there is a difference between being friends and being sisters.

This year i heard that formal recruitment was down at our school, but informal was the biggest ever ( IFC ) . It seems at my school that people would rather go find a fraternity themselves ????? its what I did also because formal recruitment was at 8 on a saturday mourning the 2nd week of school :( seriously who wants to get up for that ?

For sororities i heard that the numbers were down, but not much.

Stan...

I think this is a great point. Nothing is being done by the NIC to help us fight this problem. It is being left up to individual GLO's and even individual chapters to fend for ourselves in the face of tremendous national backlash against a few notorious and well-publicized incidents that unfortunately ruin it for us all.

When Kappa Sig and Phi Delt withdrew from NIC, I think they were echoing the frustration that we are all feeling...they finally said enough is enough...if this governing body isn't going to do anything to help the Greek system stay alive, then it isn't worth the time or the effort.

It appears to me that a possible solution to this international problem is a restructuring of the NIC and other governing bodies into organizations that take more seriously the issues of the Greek system and work towards solving them...rather than just providing simple chapter-oriented guidelines and policies.

I think we are suffering from the same type of backlash that happened in the 60's and 70's (which parallelled the overall political mood of the country) but on top of that, there's the problem that queequek stated so perfectly:

I've lost count of how many editorials I've read in student newspapers BEGGING (there is no other word) students to get involved in campus activities, period, not just Greek life. It's like people are getting more and more antisocial, at least the traditional social ways, and they arrive at college like that. I do blame a lot of it on things like the Internet and Playstation. Yes we had video games when I was a teenager, but you had to go to the arcade to play them - it was just as much about socializing and being seen as playing the games. Now I've seen people show up at parties and sit in front of Nintendo the whole time.

I'm not sure if this is temporary and will wear off, or if we're all going to be permanently plugged in - only time will tell.