Commuter Schools - How is your formal recruitment structured??

[AGDee]

I know your campus well because I work for a "major health care system" just down the street AND I used to work with the chapter there. In fact, a PNM who was thinking about going through recruitment there posted questions about it here. If you search on your University name, you'll find it. She is likely one of the women who dropped and she dropped because she had night classes on Tuesday and Thursday and therefore, couldn't make it to any of the rounds.

In all honesty, I think this is a campus that should probably just scrap formal recruitment altogether and stick to completely informal. Perhaps have a couple "Go Greek" events to give info to women who are interested and then have them sign up if they are interested and give those names to chapters to COR them. You may lose a lot of women because of things like night classes, not wanting to be on campus until after dark, conflicting work schedules, etc.

Since I don't think the chapters on campus would go for that idea (including ours!), I would probably do something like Mon & Tues round 1 open houses, Wed & Thurs round 2 open houses and THEN pref. That way, someone with M/W classes or T/TH classes that interfere would still have two opportunities to come to recruitment before Pref. It would have to be made clear that they were not to attend the same round at the same chapter two days in a row. Meaning, they'd go either M OR T to any one chapter, not both.

I'd be as upfront as possible from the first info sessions just what is expected financially and time-wise (like all your chapters have Tuesday night chapter meetings, right?) so that they have all that info before recruitment starts. I think the economy is affecting recruitment at your school more than many other schools because more are attending your school because they can't afford room & board elsewhere. That may also mean that they can't really afford sorority dues. They may also have more rigorous work schedules. Once upon a time, it was pretty much scholarship students who joined sororities at your school. I don't know whether that's still true.