[pearlbubbles]

When I went through recruitment at my university, it was deferred. At the beginning of my Junior year, we switched back to to formal fall. I also saw a chapter close due to numbers during that time. My first two years in my chapter, quota was around thirty. Since my Junior year, it's been somewhere between seventy and eighty.

At the same time, we had maybe two to five people drop from each incoming pledge class my freshman and sophomore years. When we went back to formal fall, the number was a bit higher the first year, but dropped a bit the next year (and I can't comment on current statistics--though the economy certainly "helped" a bit when I was still there). In my experience, it seems like if a university has deferred recruitment, less women go through, but generally tend to stay in the organizations. With a formal fall style, the women you tend to lose would have been the ones that wouldn't have participated in a deferred recruitment to begin with. But, in my later years, I did see many members who probably wouldn't have gone through deferred recruitment really jump into the chapter and do great things. The same can be said for women who went through informal and COB. So in that case, I can't really say whether a fall recruitment or a spring recruitment is necessarily better, from a sorority standpoint, at least. (Fraternity recruitment, however, has its own idiosyncrasies.)

I definitely agree that it has a lot to do with the "instant gratification" nature of this generation. People go in expecting certain things and if they don't get them, it's not worth their time. (I've seen a lot of people doing this at my job recently too, which seems worse to me, but it's the same idea.) I do think that the years we focused on KROP ideas, even with the sophomores moving into the house, we had less dropping.

I think the important thing to keep members in the organizations is to continue specific programming with everyone. We used to have senior meetings my last year, and it was definitely nice to still feel like you had a voice and a role, even when you weren't necessarily as active in chapter proceedings.