tl;dr: The percentage of Greek-affiliated students could easily be higher than what Admissions reports. I'm a nerd so I started number-crunching. There's still a lot of first-year students who are for sure not affiliated with fraternities or sororities (greater than 40 percent of non-local students with the most conservative of estimates I did). So the OP would still not be alone in choosing not to rush.
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Here are some numbers, primarily focusing on first-year students.
I am not aware of any NPHC chapters at the University of Mississippi allowing first-year students to participate in intake activities, so they are not included in the estimates below. Their numbers are lower than NPC and IFC chapters, though, so they would likely not shift percentages much.
According to data from the Office of Institutional Research, there were 2812 full-time female first-year students in Fall 2014. Of those, 101 were from Lafayette County, 29 from Marshall County, 24 from Panola County, 12 from Pontotoc County, and 9 from Yalobusha County. Those counties should include the majority of students who would be exempt from living on campus their first year. Let's assume they all lived at home and none of them were interested in joining sororities, as that will produce more conservative numbers. So let's say there were 2637 non-local students.
Quota was 130 according to the recruitment thread. According to HottyToddy.com, around 1445 women received bids (Chi O didn't have a number included, so I estimated that they had 130). For the purposes of these calculations, I'm assuming that no upperclassmen received bids. So that would be 54.8 percent of first-year non-local women (1445 of 2637) receiving bids.
I don't have the data to provide a good estimate for non-first-years, but I would gently suggest that not all women choose to remain in their sororities despite staying enrolled at Ole Miss. Assuming that the percentage of sorority women goes up over time would be problematic. (And *that* assumption would also rest on the idea that non-Greek women would be more likely to drop out. Or that a significant number of upperclassmen receive bids each year, but that isn't a realistic assumption at Ole Miss.) I can say that, if someone multiplied the number for total provided in the NPC Recruitment & Chapter Listing thread by ten chapters (so they'd be assuming that every chapter averages to 399 women), they would find that the number was around 48 percent of all full-time undergraduate women enrolled at the Oxford campus (3990 of 8267). I was not involved in Greek Life enough to ask how they calculate total, so I don't know if that number is useful or not.
Interestingly, only around 1391 of 10342 female students enrolled at the Oxford campus are not classified as freshmen, sophomores, juniors, or seniors--so for women, graduate students can only skew the numbers provided by Admissions by at most around 14 percent.
Let's try numbers for men now.
There were 2281 first-year men enrolled full-time on the Oxford campus in Fall 2014. Of those 2281 men, 91 were from Lafayette County, 19 from Marshall County, 20 from Panola County, 10 from Pontotoc County, and 3 from Yalobusha County. That leaves an estimated 2138 first-year men enrolled full-time and likely living on campus.
I don't have information on bids, but per the DM, 1231 men registered for recruitment in 2014. Let's assume that every one of them joined a fraternity after recruitment for the first set of numbers. That would put the estimated percentage of first-year men in fraternities at 57.6 percent. If the percentage of men registered for recruitment that received bids was roughly on par with the percentage of women registered for recruitment that received bids (1445/1556=93%), then the estimated percentage of first-year men in fraternities would drop--93% of 1231 is 1145, so the new estimate would be 53.6 percent.
Both of these numbers still leave 40 to 46 percent of first-year men who are not residents of Lafayette or adjoining counties as unaffiliated with a fraternity. Given the assumptions regarding bids, that number could be higher. That's a significant number. Again, I can't say much beyond the first year due to lack of available data.
Why is the data from Admissions so different? Here are some possibilities:
- Enrollment was considered for all campuses associated with the University of Mississippi, not just the Oxford campus, and both full- and part-time students were included. In my numbers for women, I used 2637 because that excluded part-time and local (potential commuter) students as well as those not enrolled at the Oxford campus. If I used 2864, the total number of female first-year students at any University of Mississippi campus, the percentage receiving bids drops to right around 50 percent. If we look at that multiplied total versus all female undergraduates at any University of Mississippi campus, we get under 42 percent.
- Graduate students could be included and skewing the numbers. In this case, it would likely be an either/or with the previous bullet--the percentages would likely drop below the number given by Admissions if both were the case. (Especially so if medical students were included, but I seriously doubt that they were.)
- I had no way of considering how well fraternities and sororities were able to retain members in my calculations, aside from guessing at it with sororities based on total and assumptions about what that meant about chapter size. If fraternities and sororities struggled to retain members past the first year for whatever reason, that could influence the numbers for the campus as a whole even with high first-year student percentages.
Someone should ask Admissions about how they calculated the 32 percent number. (Someone who is not me.) Does it match the percentage from the Dean of Students Office?
Sources:
http://irep.olemiss.edu/institutiona...rollment-data/
http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...137769&page=31
http://hottytoddy.com/2014/09/21/ole...d-day-of-2014/
http://www.greekchat.com/gcforums/sh...=140716&page=2
http://thedmonline.com/greek-recruit...ases-for-2014/
https://www.npcwomen.org/resources/p...%20Total-1.pdf
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