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I would have to disagree with the criticisms I've seen here of deferred recruitment, but I have to admit my feeling is based only on my experience. My campus used to have deferred recruitment (second semster). Four years ago, they switched to first semester rush.
Rush numbers dropped precipitously. Quota was too low to enable any house to reach ceiling without COBing. Morever, total membership dropped. Numbers used to be something like 50, 50, 45, 30, 30 for the five houses. Today, they are 50, 50, 40, 20, and closed. I wouldn't attribute it to "low interest in Greek life," since the men did not see a similar decline. The school is now going back to deferred recruitment.
Perhaps my school is an anomoly, but deferred rush certainly helped our campus out.
It's interesting to see what the different sorts of problems are on different campuses. At mine, for example, perhaps because of the low numbers, a woman going through rush as a sophomore had no trouble getting a bid whatsoever. If she was a junior or senior, she'd be able to get a bid through COB certainly.
I think part of the problem is that the Greek climate truly is very different from school to school, and schools have limited flexibility in adapting it to their campus. And when it is "adapted" it is usually in a harmful way that drives away rushees.
I do have to agree with A&A that we truly don't know the rushee on the other end of the posting, though. We operate on trust here, so we assume MsRushee is really a college woman rushing and not an 80-year-old man, but we aren't getting the same perspective someone rushing her gets. We've probably all known psycho rushees, and we can never be sure that isn't who we're talking to. We ought to be careful about what exactly we say to them, although this doesn't rule out being comforting. Otherwise, someday an aggravated sorority member is going to come on here and say, "LOOK! MsRushee had terrible BO and was cursing the entire party! You would cut her, too!"
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