Closing the door after the horses bolted

[LGN1212]

I've been lurking during my daughter's recent recruitment at a competitive southern school, mainly trying to re-oxidize the stress hormones that I discovered I still carried around from my own, ultimately successful, recruitment 30-whatever years ago.

We dropped off our beautiful (I know, but she is) daughter at the dorm, a bit anxious, but generally bright, shiny and optimistic. I'd tried to prepare her for the process, the do's/don't's, what to look out for etc. and I told her to expect cuts for whatever reason (actually, I recall some of the reasons, but didn't think the truth would help). Recruitment starts, cuts ensue, of course, including a couple that took her by surprise, but by pref round she had a couple she was fine with and one that she was convinced from the get-go wasn't for her, for whatever reason that 18-years olds get convinced about such things. Without describing the gory details, college has barely started, my bright shiny daughter is miserable and heart-broken, adrift in an unfamiliar environment full of happy strangers living the dream. I'm so sad for her I can't stand it and my resolutely GDI husband says he's going to shave "I WARNED YOU" into the dog.

Other than venting, where I'm going with this is that I wonder whether we shouldn't do what we can to encourage the recruitment process to be more humane. I mean really, girls, even those of us who got the long straw have to admit that we're perpetuating some of the truer-than-we-like-to-admit stereotypes about sororities. For one thing, I've always thought it was out of whack to have recruitment before college even starts. At my daughter's school, the sororities are dominated by girls (and helimoms) from a few metropolitian areas and there's a high-school popularity contest aspect to recruitment that's skewed against girls like my daughter--out of state, solid if unspectacular resume, no drawl. Rather than indulge in a hurried, gratuitously stressful and exclusionary process before college even starts, wouldn't it be better to do it like some schools do and wait until later in the first/early second semester, extend the process a bit, eliminate some of the silly artificiality, let them wear their grown-up pants around for a while and encourage everyone to make better decisions.

There, I feel a little better.