Indiana Recruitment

[DubaiSis]

The problem is girl goes to 20 parties, ranks the 4 traditionally weakest chapters as her bottom 4. She gets invited back to 16 parties (I can't remember how the days break down so I'll make up the numbers) and all 4 of the "bottom" houses are off her list. Then at 8 party day she gets back all 8 of the strongest. For preference she gets back 3 of the most competitive chapters on campus and is on every one of their 2nd bid list. At any other school she would be a quota addition, but here, after having a stellar rush, she ends up with zero.

Or, she gets back 16 parties after day one but only gets 3 back day 2. If she'd kept 1 or more of those lower chapters, she might have 4 or 5 chapters to visit again instead of just 3. If I were advising a girl going through, I'd tell her to pick her top 3 and the 3 she'd accept if worse came to worst, and fill in with the others. But this would require a girl to sit and really think, does she like this house better because of a perceived status that she wants to join or does she really seriously see herself as fitting in with this group. If there are some "they're out of my league" chapters, a girl would be wise to rank them lower right from the start. But this is unicorns pooping rainbows stuff. 18 year old girls are not going to be this practical.

And if I understand this correctly, before rush each chapter says how many girls they want to pledge. The computer tells them how many girls they can invite back after each round. So the chapter that can only pledge 25 girls this year (due to awesome retention, smaller house or whatever) is inviting back a wildly different number of girls than the chapter that can take 60, because they allow some live-outs or they don't have a chapter house. And because of that, you can't look at the IU numbers and tell how the various chapters did. The numbers don't tell the story.