[crescent&pearls]

I can't help but think that the changes in demands on students since we went to the shortened NM period in the early 90s, as well as the explosion of opportunities for students combined with changing student demographics have affected member retention across the board. For example, there wasn't a single member of my chapter during the four years I was an "active" who participated in a study abroad or semester-at-sea program. Today, the same university actively encourages every student in every major program to study abroad and even requires it for some majors. Few students lived on campus in university housing. Today, the univ requires most frosh to live in the dorms they built, and they offer incentives to sophs to stay living in the dorms even though the cost is far above living in Greek or off campus housing.

Almost every member of my chapter worked part time, but few took more than 12-14 units per semester. Most students expected to be on the 5 year plan, or more if they intended to get a teaching credential or professional license i.e. CPA, real estate, nursing, PT etc. Today I see fewer students are working while in college, both because there are fewer jobs for college students and there is a lot more pressure to graduate on schedule in 4 years because the cost of tuition and housing has multiplied exponentially. Financial aid makes it possible for more kids to go to college, and increasing enrollment has resulted in big recruitment numbers and opened up the doors for a more socio-economically diverse group of students to experience Greek Life. That's great, but overall GLOs haven't really adapted the programming or the member expectations much to mesh well with the broad group of students who are our members today. Even though we've made modifications to recruitment and the new member period, overall we're all still pretty much following the same model we were in the 1950's when most members were more alike socio-economically than they are today. So maybe we shouldn't be that surprised that what worked 50-60 years ago, or even 20-25 years ago, does not create the same results today.