I don't know exactly how they work, but this is what our panhel rep told us when I was on exec board the past two years. Like I said, I know very little about them and if they do exist on our campus they're pretty much invisible, especially because there's a lot of engineering women in panhel sororities that don't even know anything about them. But we were told that they only accept engineering students.
While it's true that all sororities have their own membership requirements, etc. I don't think that openly saying that they'll only take engineering women wouldn't sit well with everyone. I don't know the rules of panhel off the top of my head, and i'm way to tired and sick of reading to look them up
I don't quite see what the benefits of joining panhel would be for them. Participating in panhel rush- what's the point of girls having to go to a house, and them being like oh, we only take girls who are engineers? They don't really have the same interests that we do or the same functions.
Unfortunately even though I don't know much about them or even what exactly their letters,they just didn't fly with our panhellenic. I don't know how much they're like NPC sororities. Do they have ritual? Do they have a nationals with strict standards and rules, etc? What would they benefit by joining panhel?
In general, Pitt just isn't a very greek-friendly campus. We're a large, very urban campus where there's a ton of stuff to do, as opposed to a campus in the middle of nowhere or a small town where your options are limited. We also have a large commuter population so that helps even less.
Don't mean to rustle any feathers, i'm just stating what I know. And that is that they weren't admitted to our panhel because of the fact that they discriminate against non-engineering students.