Quote:
Originally posted by TigerOwl
Iowa still have a very active NPC greek community, but not in numbers of PNM's going thru. I think you are right, they need to do more PR. Many of the PNM's are coming from the State of Illinois where in the Chicagoland suburban high schools, recruitment is talked about. And yes, University of Illinois is HUGE with greeks. Illinois has the largest greek system in the country. They have PR, but it's when the students return to campus. So right now, according to last report, about 200 signed up for Panhellenic Recruitment over the website. Because of waiting til freshman get on campus to push NPC and IFC, the NPC numbers swelled to 1,308 PNM's last year on the first day of recruitment which was around September 2nd and bid day was September 12th. What a site I'm sure--1,308 PNM's visiting 21 houses over 2 days!
Does Iowa give their PNM's matching t-shirts to wear?
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Most of the Big Ten schools have fairly large Greek communities, but only because the schools themselves are so large -- the overall percentage of students that are Greek rarely tops 10-15 percent. For example, there are over 2000 Greeks at Wisconsin, but that still averages out to less than ten percent of the student body. I think there's only one school where even a quarter of the students are Greek (is that Illinois?).
It's mostly cultural. As Little E said, outside of the Chicago suburbs, there is really nowhere in the Midwest where girls go through high school knowing that they're going to rush. At Wisconsin, I'd say that for 80 percent of the girls, it was pretty much a spur-of-the-moment decision to decide to rush, or at least, they had only been thinking about it for a few months, not their whole high school career. Because of this, we have a lot of girls who drop out of rush halfway through because they aren't completely committed or they decide sorority life isn't for them. The year I rushed, we started with 800 girls and placed just over half of them. Even with the stereotypical sorority types in the ritzier high schools, most of these girls will never even think of rushing. Out of the girls from my graduating class that joined sororities, they were mostly the girls you wouldn't expect -- the ones you would expect to join didn't even contemplate it, or even looked down upon it.