Freshman preference?

[Alumnus who cares]

I'm not sure how it works across the country, but at my school pretty much anyone could rush a fraternity. There were no rules such as having to be a freshman or sophomore or anything. Of course, the fraternities could pledge whoever they wanted--they didn't have to take a "quota" of sophomores or anything like that.

So my guess is that a lot of fraternities would probably like to pledge as many freshmen as possible, because they will be around the house longer. Someone who pledges in the fall as a freshman will be an active for 3 1/2 years, as opposed to a sophomore pledge who will be an active for only 2 1/2 years (give or take).

With that in mind, my question to the members of big fraternities is: when it comes to your rush, do you focus on taking freshmen over sophomores, or do you just shoot for the best quality pledges, no matter what year they are?

Since my fraternity was smaller and didn't have the rush numbers that the big houses had, we just focused on getting as many quality guys as we could get. I don't know the stats for sure, but my guess is that our pledge classes typically had a higher percentage of sophomores (and even juniors) than those of other houses on our campus.

Any thoughts on this? Hopefully I'm making some kind of sense.

[mwedzi]

Alumnus,

My sorority also had no strong preference for freshmen. Of course, there are just more freshmen rushees than for other years. But the sophomores and juniors who do rush are the ones who realize they have the time and energy to commit themselves to a sorority (or fraternity). Often, many freshmen don't realize this, especially incoming freshmen, and that + their overall at being at college makes them more likely to rush.

Anyway, all the chapters at my school (where greek life isn't that big anyway) were definitely more focused on getting sophomores or juniors that would contribute 2 - 3 years of high quality contributions than freshmen who would realize it was too much for them, not make the grades and become inactive or so overwhelmed by college that they were practically inactive. When your chapter is small, everyone has to be active.

[Corbin Dallas]

We mainly focus on the freshmen. My campus is really small, about 1600 students, but the greek system is pretty big, around 600 or so. Since there are only 400 freshmen to begin with, 100 are women, and probably 50 or so aren't remotely interested in rush, that leaves 8 fraternities trying to get 250 guys, but usually 150-200 go greek. When it comes to sophomores or juniors, we have nothing against them, but most of them have rushed, and those that didn't, we probably don't want. Since this is an engineering school, most of the guys that don't rush are pretty antisocial. Anyway, if any sophomores or juniors DO want to rush, it is their responsibility to come to us.

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Steve Corbin
Lambda Chi Alpha
Theta Kappa Chapter
Rose-Hulman Inst. of Tech.

[Microbiomajor]

I am from a school of 19,000 with a 10% greek system. We have about 300 women rush each year, and chapter total is 80. We have 12 sororities on campus. A large number of freshman and sophomores rush, as well as a few juniors, and even the occasional senior. I was a Rho Chi last year, and as far as I could tell, most chapters focused on freshman and sophomores equally. Some chapters, however, are not allowed to take anyone over sophomore status, so the juniors and seniors had slight difficulty, but most of them get placed, or if they don't, it's usually not because of their class standing. This past year we even placed a woman in her mid 30s in a sorority!