Inside views of the IU rush dynamic: http://sororityparents.com/2011/01/sorority-recruitment-at-indiana-university_bloomington/
If you read a few comments down, you can see why the situation is the way it is at IU. Seems that there is a lack of courage all around. Also seems like the girls who get in (and those alums) do NOT want the system at IU to change.
Some states have made it clear with their financial aid policies that low income in-state students are not really welcome (e.g. PA and IL). IN does make it inexpensive for low income good (3.5 HS GPA / 600s SAT / 28 ACT) students to attend IU-B and Purdue-WL, based on its net price calculator (although this appears to be a mix of both need and merit aid, and the actual percentage of students from low income backgrounds is not that high). So perhaps IN (at least for IU-B) needs to reconcile how it cultivates the social environment at the school with the financial aid policy.
Purple Titan: Thank you for the great link in post #240. The parent comments say half the girls interested in sororities are left out. This is happening at a university emphasizing its partnership with greek life. Wow.
I don’t know how long it will take me to read all the comments in Purple Titan’s link. PG: Please don’t ever tell me again about how bad southern sororities are compared to others. This is just unparalleled and in your midwest neighborhood.
Thanks again, Purple Titan. This really helps put some things described in the book in perspective for me.
@alh, true, IU is in the Midwest, though from my (admittedly outsider) perspective, IU feels like the most “southern” Big10 school.
Culturally, the southern halves of OH/IN/IL (especially the rural areas) are pretty different from the northern halves of those states and are closer to KY/TN/WV.
^^Agree completely! The comments in that link were pretty heartbreaking.
Purple Titan: At my southern flagship, and others with which I am familiar, a girl who doesn’t cut any groups from her list, and attends three preference parties gets a bid. period. In this system many who do rush the “right” way aren’t getting bids. Cheerleaders with 4.0 averages aren’t getting bids. Former sorority members are fussing at posters who encourage moms to help maximize their daughters chances by concentrating on their appearance and social skills, pointing out there should be a place for every girl interested.
It looks like some of these parents are confronting the administration about the situation and may be going to start support groups for rejected girls. Good for them.
So at other schools, there is a three-invite system and if you get to the preference round, you get in somewhere? Is the percentage of those that get in at other places much higher? Aren’t those girls just as devastated? Is the difference that the cuts come sooner?
It certainly sounds like at least some girls with all the right connections, GPA, clothes and personality (at least according to their moms) do not get bids either.
Support groups for rejected girls sounds awful to me. Just awful in every imaginable way. Oh my.
Yes, the IU system seems like a pretty brutal process.
mom2and: There are a series of parties. PG can probably explain it better. The first party is huge and everyone will be included. Southern sororities have been criticized on this board for requiring recommendations for invitations to even first round parties. Sometimes if you don’t know the system and don’t have recs, you aren’t able to participate unless some actives like you enough they get busy and find you some recs. I thought preference was the fourth party. I am trying to remember. I think we cut legacies we weren’t pledging after second party, so they had as many options as possible. And then there was a third party and then preference.
At southern schools with which I’m familiar, there is some complicated formula between number of girls rushing and number of bids offered. Quota is determined by number of girls rushing. If a girl doesn’t cut any groups from her list, if she attends the maximum number of parties she is able to in each round, she should be guaranteed a bid. At Indiana, quota is determined by number of beds available in the houses. My sorority had 55 beds. We had between 250 and 300 actives/pledges during my years. This was membership based on always taking quota, but a few girls leaving for various reasons, most often an early marriage.
At my flagship, if a girl didn’t get into a house, it was because she refused to consider all the houses as acceptable choices. Or because she didn’t understand she needed recommendations.
This is not true at the big southern schools. There is not enough room for everybody. There are women who don’t cut any houses, and who are still not asked back for one of the party rounds because no house wants them. However, recently, in the last ten years or so, most colleges (including Indiana, after the 2011 situation described in that link) have gone to a system that ends up cutting women earlier, so that if a woman gets to the last round, “preference,” she will get a bid from one of the houses. It used to be that the top houses, which most women wanted to join, would be inviting back many women they knew they would not be offering a bid to. Now, (at most colleges but not Indiana) houses are more restricted in how many they can invite back in the earliest rounds, so that women who won’t be invited to join the top houses learn it sooner.
I’m an awful person, because all I can think when reading this is-- now you know what it’s like. Only about 50-60% of women who want to join a sorority at Indiana get a bid, and the daughter knew this going in. Apparently this is perfectly all right with this mother, and the daughter too, as long as her own daughter isn’t one of the rejected ones. Once little Snowflake gets rejected, suddenly there’s a problem. Feh.
The book tells about another case in Indiana that only monsters would have created. Sorority rush was before winter vacation, and then the women returned to school a few days early to find out which sorority had given them a bid. Some of them returned from winter vacation a few days early to discover that no sorority had given them a bid. The Panhell council has since then quietly called the bidless ones and told them not to return, but how could anyone be so cruel as to have ever instituted this practice in the first place? And hasn’t Panhell heard of non-refundable airline tickets?
I do not think frazzled D would have been interested in going through recruitment that required recs.
From what I understand, girls at her school who went through to preference all got bids, but a small number got cut from all chapters before preference even though they tried hard to do everything right, and even though there was room in the system for everyone. D was upset enough when she got cut from some houses she liked and where she thought she had made a good impression, even though she was on a campus where lots of girls had no interest in Greek life and she herself was never really vested in an image of herself as a “sorority girl” from the get-go; she registered for recruitment on a whim when a couple of other girls she had gotten to know suggested it “might be fun.”
I confess that all week long, I dreaded getting that call telling me that she had been turned down everywhere. (A few of her independent friends might have laughed and said something along the lines of “I told you so…”)
I honestly don’t know whether it is worse to be one of only a few PNM’s getting cut during recruitment, or one of many. It actually seems to me that there should be some strength in numbers in the latter type of situation. (The image of several dozen girls in a party dorm becoming social isolates is pretty jarring, and I think the university should take some responsibility for this.)
I have to wonder if choosing the party dorm would increase odds for a high SES girl at IU to get into a sorority. It (the party dorm) does seem to be a particularly toxic environment for someone without a burning interest in sorority life, or someone from a lower SES background. I am also wondering about whether there are other support systems at IU that work well for students who come from a lower SES. I guess I need to read the book.
The authors lament that there are support systems for a few low SES women, if they’re academic high achievers and they know enough to apply, but nothing (or at least, nothing the book tells us about) for the rest. One young women on the floor, lower middle class rather than working class, had a father who had some college education and had known enough to get her in one of the support programs, from which she hugely benefited. The authors also say that they thought the low SES women were some of the smartest on the floor, and had shown drive and guts to even manage to buck the odds and get out of their small towns and into IU.
Have there been any interviews with the women on the floor, where they reacted to the book? I’d love to hear from them.
My neighbors daughter was terribly hurt when most all of her friends made it into sororities and she did not. She came home and cried.
CF; have to agree with your sentiment in 252. It is sad for these girls to not get a bid. It is not, IMHO, a tragedy, however. And the bottom line seems to be that the sorority girls like being so very exclusive. It works for them, so why would they change it? The administration may not want any more Greek houses on campus either. It thought the comment from the mom that went through this years ago and then sent her daughter into the same system with the same result of no bid was interesting: why would you encourage your daughter to participate in such a system?
It sounds like some of the other schools have slightly less cruel systems, but the outcome is still the same at many: only the chosen get into the sorority and the others are rejected.
This is true for boys as well. One friend’s son got no bids. He was upset for a while especially because his friends there and at other schools were in frats. But he joined an EC he liked and has been happy ever since. Not sure if that is representative of most places.
I am not defending a sorority recruitment system that requires recommendations. I would love to see sororities and fraternities eliminated from college campuses. The negatives outweigh the positives in my opinion. Recently, on the sorority threads, I’ve been suggesting the idea of random, lottery type sorority selection as a way around the built-in biases and elitism of the system. As far as I know, no one has been willing to support the idea, even as a hypothetical. Maybe CF did. However, CF has been pretty clear on all the threads, she’s not interested in joining one way or another. It’s not as though I think anyone at Panhellenic is going to take my suggestions seriously! Interestingly, some non sorority women seem just as opposed to the lottery system as sorority women. I could understand those with daughters in sororities might support the current system. I was surprised women who hadn’t been in sororities, and didn’t have daughters participating, wanted to spend time arguing in favor of a selective system.
I’m always amused by women who advise women who are trying for sororities to maximize their choices, as if that would solve the problem of rejection. I look at the system, not an individual woman. An individual woman maximizing her choices doesn’t mean more women will get bids; it just means different women will get bids.
To be sure, if Marigold Middle focuses on top sororities and gets rejected by all of them, she’s not maximizing her choices: she could have gotten a bid from Alpha Beta Middle. But if she had done that, it wouldn’t have created another opening at Alpha Beta Middle: they only have a certain number of women they’re going to pick. Rather, Marigold would have displaced Lily Lower. And maybe then Lily, smartly maximizing her choices, would have moved down to Gamma Gamma Least. But there’s a chain reaction now, and now Begonia Bottom loses her spot and is rejected by all, even though she maximized her choices.
I don’t see the systemic advantage for Marigold Middle to get a bid and Begonia Bottom not to get one, instead of the other way around. Either way, somebody’s crying. If there are 1000 women rushing and 800 spots, somebody’s going to get rejected. Piously advising a woman to maximize their choices is like piously advising someone to be better at elbowing when playing musical chairs-- she might get now get a chair, but somebody’s still going to be left out if there aren’t enough chairs.
At Indiana, almost half the women rushing get rejected. And the women who get accepted, plus the sorority alumni, love it that way. It’s hilarious to me when someone who thought she was entitled to be accepted somehow gets rejected, and suddenly she sees the flaws of the system. Hypocrite.