Alabama Recruitment

[AOII Angel]

Originally Posted by Low C Sharp

I know many women who rushed on a whim without recs at U of Illinois and experienced few cuts. You can do all right without them there, even though the system is immense.

That's not a criticism of Bama -- IMHO, it makes a lot more sense to cut PNMs based on recs than on looks, and looks are necessarily going to form a bigger part of the impression a PNM makes if the chapter has no other information. I'm just saying that system size alone doesn't explain the importance of recs in the SEC.

You are correct. Yes, recs make it easier to make easy cuts in a system with 1500 PNMs, but recs predate recruitments that large. A lot of it has to do with tradition. Even if suddenly the PNM pool dried up, the need to have recs would not dry up with them. It's part of the mystique of greek life in these large systems. They also serve an important purpose. But.......

[Low C Sharp]

the more selective schools (even in the South) tend to have very diverse Greek systems, which indicates to me at least that the rush isn't as cutthroat.

If you could quantify admissions selectivity and add it to rush cutthroatedness, my guess is that Duke would have the highest sum. It's a long way from Bama in terms of rush stakes, though.
________
Laguna Heights Condominium Wong Amat

[UHDEEGEE]

The Southern kids with the smarts and the $ went to these schools or went North for their education.

I wouldn't make this assumption at all. My son has the smarts and the $ and is being heavily recruited already for Fall of 2010 by Columbia, Emory and Rice to name a few, yet he has narrowed his top two choices to 2 state SEC schools.

[Munchkin03]

Originally Posted by UHDEEGEE

I wouldn't make this assumption at all. My son has the smarts and the $ and is being heavily recruited already for Fall of 2010 by Columbia, Emory and Rice to name a few, yet he has narrowed his top two choices to 2 state SEC schools.

I would agree, although it's a fairly recent phenomenon. My Southern HS regularly sends kids to the Ivies/Stanford/MIT, but a good number of the kids who are accepted to an Ivy and a Florida school will often pick the Florida school because of Bright Futures. Also, family tradition and the fact that most of one's friends are headed to Tuscaloosa or Gainesville often sways the kids.

If the statistics still bear out from the 1998-1999 school year, the majority of students at Duke, Vandy, Rice, and Emory are from the Northeast.

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by BadCat25

The elite southern colleges are Duke, Vandy, Emory, Rice, Davidson and one or two others. The Southern kids with the smarts and the $ went to these schools or went North for their education.

Really? They still let Southern kids into Duke? (I kid. Sort of.)

I'm going to have to call bull, or at least partial bull, on this. This gets into that "the South is not a monolith" discussion we've had on GC from time to time. What's true in some parts of the South may not be true elsewhere in the South.

Without cutting any of the schools you mentioned (well, except for the cuts I already took at Duke), I've known very few people with smarts & money who chose to go to Vandy, Emory or Rice. Those schools really aren't on the radar screen of most people in NC -- the people I have known who went to those schools were typically from Tennessee, Georgia or Texas respectively (or their families were). Likewise, relatvely few people go north to school unless they get scholarships. And don't try arguing that NC isn't really the South -- you've already identified Davidson as an elite Southern college, so that dog won't hunt.

Around here, if you have the smarts and the money and you're looking for one of the "right" places to go, you go to UNC (not that the money is as big an issue there), Duke, Wake Forest, Davidson, UVa, Hampden-Sydney, or maybe William and Mary. (In other words, you go to school in North Carolina or Virginia.)

[xoredhotxo]

...or washington and lee

[MysticCat]

Originally Posted by xoredhotxo

...or washington and lee

Thanks -- I meant to include them. And I still have the feeling that I've left someone else out, too . . . .

[LadyLonghorn]

First of all, I said recruitment about as competitive as the SEC. I was thinking more along the lines of places like Vandy (which I realize is technically in the SEC but I never really think about them that way.) But others also have a point when they said Texas is getting right up there as well. I know many people who couldn’t get into Texas because of the top 10 rule who ended up at places like Rice or the Ivies. This is why I find the intellectual snobbery based solely on the college attended so terribly entertaining. Little Owl, just so you don’t feel so alone in your intellectual tower here, I’d like you to know that I was also accepted by both Harvard and Stanford. I chose Texas because I wanted a well-rounded college experience, and I can assure you I am far from being alone.

To address another point, Texas has an extremely competitive Greek system to go along with its selective admission standards, but there is no way anyone would ever call the Greek system here diverse.

[HDL66]

Originally Posted by LadyLonghorn

First of all, I said recruitment about as competitive as the SEC. I was thinking more along the lines of places like Vandy (which I realize is technically in the SEC but I never really think about them that way.) But others also have a point when they said Texas is getting right up there as well. I know many people who couldn’t get into Texas because of the top 10 rule who ended up at places like Rice or the Ivies. This is why I find the intellectual snobbery based solely on the college attended so terribly entertaining.

Texas may have become very "selective" because of political decisions (i.e. the top ten rule), but you can't extrapolate that to being on par academically with the IVYs. If you research the 25th/75th percentile ACT scores, you'll find UT's numbers are 21/28. For those that aren't as intellectual as LadyLonghorn, that means that 21% of students enrolled at UT received a composite ACT of 21 or lower; 75% received a 28 or lower. On the other hand, John's Hopkins numbers are 29/33. A glaring disparity, even to the casual observer. All actual IVY league schools were higher (28-31/32-35), and Vandy was 30/33.

Similarly, admission rates for 2007-08 for JH were 25.7%, for UT 50.7%.

I do think you can get an EXECLLENT education at most universities in the country, every university has top students that could have gone elsewhere, and an IVY league degree (heck, any college degree) doesn't equal a successful life. But if you want to play the "My university is as selective/academically rigorous as yours" game, you'd better have the ammunition.

Originally Posted by LadyLonghorn

Little Owl, just so you don’t feel so alone in your intellectual tower here, I’d like you to know that I was also accepted by both Harvard and Stanford. I chose Texas because I wanted a well-rounded college experience, and I can assure you I am far from being alone.

[BadCat25]

To compare average ACTs is not being entirely fair to the University of Texas. Texas has to average in the scores of the football team, which I think is an average of like 3 1/2. That went up a bit since Vince Young left for the Tennessee Titans.

[FSUZeta]

recruitment at ole miss is very competitive-it's just that it occurs later in the semester and school has not begun yet, so the girls were able to transfer and attend this semester.

[BlueCarnation]

Originally Posted by FSUZeta

recruitment at ole miss is very competitive-it's just that it occurs later in the semester and school has not begun yet, so the girls were able to transfer and attend this semester.

That's what I thought...But these girls think they have a chance even if they were cut at Bama? I would think word would get around, wouldn't it? Wow...

[OleMissGlitter]

Originally Posted by BlueCarnation

That's what I thought...But these girls think they have a chance even if they were cut at Bama? I would think word would get around, wouldn't it? Wow...

Word does get around but it just depends on the situation as to whether or not they will have a good recruitment at Ole Miss.

ETA: And yes we have called other SEC chapters in the past to check...

[Texas APhi]

Does anyone what company took the Bid Day pictures for the sororities and if they are available to view online?

[rolltide1]

I am sure that anyone who had a daughter participating in Alabama recruitment will agree that it took a lot out of the mothers and especially the daughters on both sides of the recruitment process. Fox News is reporting that over 50 suspected or confirmed cases of swine flu in Tuscaloosa are believed to have started during sorority recruitment at Alabama.