NPC growth statistics for decade

[oldu]

With the end of the first decade of the 21st century I thought it might be interesting to assess the growth patterns of the 26 NPC sororities. I would like to do it for fraternities, NPHC & other groups too, but their statistics are greatly lacking.
Here are the year-by-year figures:

2000 28 chapters chartered & opening of 1 new institution to NPC
2001 30 " " " 2 "
2002 28 " " " 3 "
2003 30 " " " 7 "
2004 26 " " " 7 "
2005 36 " " " 3 "
2006 23 " " " 1 "
2007 40 " " " 3 "
2008 36 " " " 1 "
2009 37 " " " 4 "

For the decade a total of 314 NPC sorority chapters were chartered or re-chartered. Surprisingly, offsetting this 270 NPC chapters closed, making a net gain of only 44 more chapters than exactly a decade earlier. If you deduct the new institutions, there are fewer chapters at existing institutions than a decade ago. I could not do the closings year-by-year because the exact dates of about one-fourth were not available.

On a very positive side, 32 new institutions welcomed NPC groups to their campus. Only one school (Alfred) banned Greek groups during the decade. John Carroll University welcoming NPC Greeks and Lake Forest College re-welcoming them were probably the greatest coups. Existing systems at high quality schools that had impressive growth were Central Florida, DePaul, George Washington, Grand Valley, Loyola Marymount & North Carolina State.

In another post I am going to list the ten-year figures for each NPC sorority. It may surprise you when you see which groups grew the most, or shrunk in size, during the decade. For the record, I am using the date a chapter was chartered, not colonized.