What campus gets the award for the most chapters pledging quota?

[AGDee]

Originally Posted by OSU Maman

Can someone explain what quota is in relationship to a fraternity or sorority?

It is the number of new members that each chapter is allowed to take which is based on the number who are going through recruitment. Each campus decides how they are going to set quota. It used to be common to take the number of PNMs who signed up for recruitment and divide by the number of chapters. That didn't end up being very fair though because some of those women would drop out. Quota is generally set further down the process now and sometimes is based on how many signed bid cards. So, if there were a 200 PNMs who signed bid cards and 10 sororities, quota would be 10. Each chapter could take 20 PNMs.

However, there is another number, called Total, which complicates things. Total is a maximum chapter size, essentially, that is set by the College Panhellenic. If Total is 100 and a chapter reaches or exceeds that number when they take Quota, then they are done recruiting! However, if they are below Total, they can do Continuous Open Recruitment (COR) until they reach Total. Chapters can exceed Total by taking Quota, but then they can't take any more women.

The system is designed to try to keep the sororities about the same size with the philosophy that if all the chapters are strong, then the Panhellenic system is strong. If two chapters had 200 members, 5 had around 100 and the other 3 had 50 or so, things wouldn't be equitable. Despite these heroic attempts to keep chapters around the same size, some chapters still struggle with numbers though.