Quote:
Originally posted by Firehouse
My god, Hoosier, yes! Let me stand behind you so I won't get hit by the arrows that are coming your way.
Reduce the rules and increase the number of sororities. The sororities here are huge and successful, but we lose one every four or five years because someone is always the weak house. Instead of adding more new blood whose enthusiasm could energize the enttie system, they take the attitude that, well, if a woman doesn't want to join the best houses, she can always join the weakest. Panhellenic Love and all that.
When I was a freshman, we had nineteen sororities, all well-housed. Today, the memberships are larger, but we only have fourteen sororities; we've lost five and we're probably going to lose a sixth. Plenty of women want to pledge; they just don't want to pledge a weak house. Add more chapters! There are sororities dying to come back here, and a few still own their old houses.
Carnation's criticizm is on target. Not only are women going bidless, but a lot of really top-qulity women don't even go through rush because the top sororities won't take anyone who's not a freshman.
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We lose far more fraternities on a regular basis than we do sororities. The last time my campus lost a sorority was in the early 1990s, but we lose a fraternity every other year or so. This pattern is reflected on larger and smaller scales at every campus across the country. I'm not sure your plan is the best way to maximize membership. The fraternities have certainly not escaped the weak house/strong house designations -- that's not just a sorority thing.
I think there are three things that need to be happening:
1) Move away from the huge, competitive, formal rush systems into a more informal rush. The more informal rush is, the less pressure -- and the less pressure, the more likely it is that a girl will judge a house on its character and sisterhood instead of its reputation (and vice versa). It's these intense rushes where everyone's so focused on only getting the perfect girls/the perfect house that cuts are so heavy.
2) Be open to taking girls who aren't so young, or who have rushed more than once. Older girls who have been around school for a while have established themselves (you know what they're about), and they're (I hate to stereotype, but this is true) more likely to choose a chapter based on the deep-down stuff rather than the superficial. Maybe not a LOT more likely, but at least somewhat more likely. Separate quotas based on school year might help this. For EACH school year -- sophomores included.
3) Total needs to be examined and reset much, much more often than it is. At most campuses, nobody's even looked at the number in years, let alone thought about changing it. At my school, total is the same now as it was fifteen years ago when the average sorority size was a good 40 women higher. We need to stay on top of this number because the ideal total for a campus changes so much, and having it too high or too low can drastically affect membership. (For example, a campus near here has total set at a number that NO sorority on campus has reached, thus every sorority -- even the "top tier" groups -- has to focus their energy on COB year-round. That shouldn't be happening.)