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In past years, recruitment numbers have been declining around the country. This was happening before the new RFM came out, so I don't think you can blame declining enrollment on the new RFM. Of course the reasons for the decline are different at every campus - but one of the biggest is that we are not reaching enough women in a positive manner and we are not reaching so people at all. PR on campus is usually non-existant or a case of too little too late.
We always were able to get plenty of women to sign up for recruitment, so our PH's aren't used to having to do PR. Now that there are so many other options for these women on campus to be leaders or find new friends, we see many that normally would have gone through recruitment, skipping it. Tri-Delta did a great article about it a year or so ago. It had an interview with an outstanding woman on campus that WASN'T greek and why she wasn't interested in being greek.
This is purely speculation on my part - so don't flame me, but perhaps at OU, recruitment had become too cut-throat. I think a new chapter will help this and I know that Alpha Phi is doing a lot of PR before they come on. Smart on their part no matter what since a chapter house there is a sizable investment. But, we saw this at UT when I was in the chapter. We went from recruitment of 1300 to 650 in about 5 years. Why, b/c it was so hard to get into any group. Women started going to other schools to go through recruitment. Many started with the intention of transfering to UT, but stayed b/c they found their place at the other school. Consequently, our numbers went way down (we still haven't gotten back to 1000 and it's been almost 10 years since we bottomed out). Other state school have gone up and stayed consistent. Pretty sad when you think about UT being the largest public university in the US out of 50,000+ students we can't field 1000 who want to be greek.
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