Hmm.. this is something I really hadn't put much thought into. But here goes...
I think that any man or woman striving to be a better person is an excellent candidate for the Greek system. These people are all over the place, at many different kinds of schools. I know people I graduated with who were way smarter than I am went to community colleges because they didn't know what they wanted to do or couldn't afford anywhere else. I went to a small private university on the space coast, but that doesn't make me any smarter than those kids just because I go to a supposedly better school. So I can't really see how only wanting to expand to top schools would provide better members to the Greek system. Excellent men and women are found everywhere in the world, not just at Harvard or Yale.
However, I can see the difficulty of creating a chapter at a junior college or commuter school. I don't think that GPA is necessarily an issue, but interest may be. People at junior colleges don't usually have a lot of school pride because it's usually just a stepping stone to the university that they really want to go to. If you don't have a lot of school pride, you're not going to be very active on campus, because you're just getting out of there as soon as you can anyway, right? I know I'm making some generalizations here, but this is what I've gotten from talking to my friends who do go to junior colleges.
Also, if you're transferring soon, making a large committment to something like a fraternity or sorority probably isn't that high up on your priority list. We had a girl who pledged Alpha Phi last year who wanted to transfer to Virginia Tech. She got her acceptance to transfer a semester early and told us that while she loved us, she was de-pledging because she didn't know the Alpha Phis at VT, and that she would be required to live at the house if she was accepted by their chapter (we didn't have a house at the time), and she would feel awkward living with strangers. While I do think that in some ways having a group of friends in Alpha Phi there when she got there would have helped her adjust better, I can also see how it would be very intimidating, especially to go from a chapter of 30 girls to something like 80-100.
I think a 4-year commuter school could have some successful chapters because these students will be sticking around for all 4 years. They probably wouldn't have a very large greek system though, but that isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. There are plenty of schools with great Greek systems that only have a few chapters. I personally like it that there are only 8 chapters on my campus instead of 20. It's much easier to get to know everyone that way and I think less rivalries develop because you HAVE to be close to survive (except for the fact that there's only 2 sororities, but even then, we work together when it's really important and we realize that if one of us goes down, the other will soon follow).
Just my two pennies.
