If No Deferred Recruitment, What's A Good Alternative?

[33girl]

I will be blunt: at my noncompetitive school, recruitment for first semester freshmen women was a horrible idea. Not only that, it was informal recruitment - they didn't have to visit all the groups at all!! They only were interested in the biggest and most popular groups and if they didn't get them, they became anti-Greek. I think that the reason for this was because a lot of the women rushing were the more stereotypical "sorority girl" - as opposed to when rush is deferred, and the women have a semester or 2 to realize that everyone isn't like Babs and Mandy from Animal House.

Our Greek advisor at the time actually said "we want to get them before they know any better." That's paraphrasing a bit, and I don't think that's the case at your school. But it was just another example of her complete incompetence.

IMO this went a long way towards killing off 2 sororities at our university, and giving a bad light to the Greek system that is still lingering, 10 years later.

And yeah, I am going to say, I think 1st semester rush works OK for the guys, because guys and girls are just different. Guys also don't have to worry about totals and quotas.

Other than a onetime one hour anti-hazing workshop, I think supplemental NM programs are a terrible idea, and I wouldn't be surprised if you lose some people because of them. Many colleges have a study skills or freshman program similar to this anyway - the NMs would end up sitting through the same stuff twice. If you don't have this sort of program, and if it IS really beneficial information, shouldn't it be offered to ALL freshmen? Limiting a program to Greeks will just create anti-Greek resentment. Also, I'm guessing that the pledge classes won't be freshmen only, and I think that asking a junior to take a study skills class is ridiculous.

I can't say as I blame the administration for wanting to show that 1st semester rush is a bad plan, because I agree, but they're doing it in an ass-backwards way, for the wrong reasons.