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Originally Posted by DeltaBetaBaby
It's nice to see so many expansion opportunities, but I could see why orgs would be nervous to plunk down change for a house, knowing it could drop off again.
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I think hesitance on housing is more about economics. You're talking about foundations invested in real estate & seeking to re-balance their portfolios in the wake of a paradigm shift within the property holding dynamic with regard to debt percentage and risk factors. In other words, it's not as safe as we used to think to own just a ton of real estate versus a balance of other investments. The more in debt you are against real estate that might drop in value, the higher the risk. And, it's hard to get financing now anyway so you can do about 1/7th as many projects as you could do before just on that basis alone. It's actually an excellent time to be (selectively) going into properties, but the barriers to entry are very high.
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I also wonder if/how orgs are going to evolve to accmomodate the influx of non-traditional students in the coming years.
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Just empirically, I've already seen quite a lot of that. There's a lot of older veterans entering fraternities at my school. It's a very low number overall, but still very noticeable.
There is some friction in that regard. I've girls describe another fraternity as "creepy old guys" because they had three veterans that were around 24-26. I've watched an argument about bidding a vet that 24 (and was disgusted that they'd consider penalizing someone for military service).
I think it'll take time to normalize. After WWII & Korea a lot of vets flowed through fraternities with great success & no real issues. I know not all the non-traditionals we're talking about are vets, but they lead the way in making the age factor more acceptable. I guess it will be less so with sororities, but I don't know. I've seen cases of them being very discriminatory against 20yo girls with 3-4 years of school left, but accepting of 18yo girls with 2-3 years left. That's not a complaint so much as just an observation. What they do is their business, even if it doesn't always make sense.
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