[PhiPsiRuss]

Originally posted by 33girl
Well, I thought that Vietnam produced dead fraternity members, but I guess that's just me.

I'm not mentioning the name of whom I spoke with, because I am likely to quote him out of context, and did so with the way I mentioned Vietnam. His comment was not that Vietnam was a good thing. He basically said that those who fought in it had there collegiate careers postponed, and that they started college as older, and more mature students.

Re the "diverse" comment, I didn't quite know how to put what I meant...I knew it would come out wrong. (This is another thing that has nothing to do with drinking age) A lot of new student aid came about in the 1970's and 1980's....college (and Greek life) was no longer only for the rich. Greek life also expanded at a lot of smaller schools. So you're going to get a much wider variety of types of people joining, which I think is great. It seems nowadays that the pendulum is swinging back and all the risk-management preventatives (third party vendors, party buses etc) are once again making Greek life something you have to be wealthy to be part of. I'm not saying the preventatives are inherently bad, but when you have to do all that it takes a toll on your finances that chapters cannot always handle without jacking their dues into the stratosphere.

The result is that you have a smaller pool of people joining Greek life and more risk of homogenization. So I didn't mean race-religion-sexuality diverse, I meant it in a $$ way.

I thought that the emergence of student aid, for new classes of people, was primarily initiated with the GI Bill immediately following WWII.

His perspective is primarily from his undergraduate greek system, which dates to the 19th century. His graduate work was at schools without greek systems, so he had no direct frame of reference at those two schools. Also, I'm sure that he talks with his peers about these issues.

As far as the cost of preventives making GLOs less affordable, the current trend is of increasing membership size, as liability insurance is at an all-time high. I don't believe that the numbers show any correlation between the cost of liability insurance and the ability to maintain, and even increase chapter sizes.

Maybe there are some parents who think college time = party time, but I'm guessing that there are far more out there like the parents at South Carolina who had fits that their little darlings might be wasting a millisecond of study time pledging.

I was very surprised to hear him mention this, and I don't think that he meant that this was the norm, but rather, as a small, but visible trend that creates problems.

But to answer the question, NO, the 18YO age was not the primary variable. There were far too many other things going on at that time. (Including one I missed - coeducation at formerly all-male schools)

I'd like to hear some more opinions on this from those who were involved when the drinking age dropped.