I am a greek with NPC experience from my college days in the 80's. My youngest dd just finished up rush at her school and I am shocked by the changes to rush--is this normal--or just a poorly run NPC?
It's an 8 sorority system. They had formal rush in the Fall for upperclassmen and again in the spring opened to all. Rush was 100% on-line in the spring. (no idea they could hold 2 formal rushes in the same school year).
Spring Rush first 2 nights were meet/greet parties with PNM's going to 4 houses per night. All PNM's to all orgs. The Gamma Chi asked the girls to rank the orgs 1-8 after the first round of parties, as they could only pick 4 org's for the next round.
Next round-PNM's pick from their invites to go to 4 parties. When invites for the second round of parties were handed out, so many PNM's got cut from the "best" orgs that 34% of the PNM's dropped before round #2.
Gamma Chi says rank your remaining 4-we match for preference invites. The next day receive your 2 pref match invites with bids the same night.
My dd got her bottom 4 for round 2 and expressed disappointment to her Gamma Chi in not getting an invite from her #1-"Sally Sea Shell Sorority". Gamma Chi-"not surprising-they only take girls from X and Y geographical area and you're not from there."
DD's roomie also went through rush--in a different PNM group-roomie's Gamma Chi was shocked to see that roomie got an invite back to "Alice Allgood Sorority" and "Terry Turtle Sorority" round 2 since their "pref lists" were already set/known before rush officially started. Gamma Chi discouraged her from attending those 2 for round 2 -"don't waste the opportunity to visit orgs you have a chance at receiving bids from" but roomie went any way with high hopes-roomie didn't make it to pref at either and was crushed.
So that's 3 of the 8 org's that have some sort of "pre-set" selection process.
At the end of this, 6 of the 8 orgs pledged full quota, 1 org pledged 50%, with 1 org only pledging 2 girls!! Approximately 19% of the girls that attended pref/invite parties went home without pledging and/or receiving a bid.
Adding that together they placed approximately 52% of the PNM's that started the process in the first round of parties.
Is this normal now? A huge cut from the 1st to 2nd round? Pre-picked pref parties? Selections based on geography? Such a huge loss of PNM's?
Maybe just different than I remember