PG, Tufts really does do it differently than all other Panhellenics. If all the houses cut Susie, someone will have to invite her back against their will.
https://twitter.com/NorthwesternPHA
Here’s the NU panhel association board. CF, does this look like a bunch of look-alike, designer-clad, overly-made-up skeletal blonde beauty queens to you? Not to me. They look like the kinds of girls I’d hang out with if I were that age!
@barrons, you asked the question of whether some kids would not know that rich kids would ignore them. I provided an answer. Not everyone grows up in a place with wealthy folks who have worked on Wall Street.
Here’s what I think is ridiculous at Indiana. Per their website, for 2014:
• 1,319 women participated in bid matching
• 1,002 received bids
• 317 women not matched in process
They have 22 houses. Most other schools would then say - ok, so your quota is 1319/22 = 59 and off you go. Indiana is apparently the only system that makes a quota based on the actual number of beds. That’s just plain stupid and mean. You won’t find me defending that. And honestly, if I had a daughter going there, I might tell her not to rush - those odds aren’t worth the heartache.
How do they determine that, Hanna? How do they decide who draws the short straw, so to speak?
PG, They look like a nice bunch to me.
PG, I’m not sure. My bet is that they have some kind of rotation. I think they keep the procedure private because they want to make sure no member can ever deduce that their house was pushed to take them.
The national organizations apparently tolerate this violation of their membership rules because they value having a chapter at such a great school. Likewise, they stretch their policy of only having chapters at schools that recognize the Greek system in order to have chapters at Harvard.
I like the RFM process. At least if a woman has no chance at a sorority, she finds out as soon as possible. There’s no sense in the most popular houses stringing along women who have no chance of getting a bid from them.
Could someone please explain RFM to me? I am reading about it but don’t really understand how it is different than what we did in my house decades ago. (But I am not expert here. I was not a rush officer)
This is what I thought we were doing: after each party we had to cut the number of girls we could invite back to the next party. That was the rule. Each invitation list got smaller. Every girl we invited back was a potential sister. After second party we voted on legacies. We could only pledge X number of legacies or the majority of the house would be legacies. So we made a decision on legacies at that point so they were aware they needed to look elsewhere. Other than the legacies it seemed we needed to go through the lists and eliminate girls until we got to the number of invitations we had to give out. If we invited someone to a preference party, it was understood she might get a bid. It just depended on the matching whether she ended up with us. We were supposed to make the preference party girls want to put us as first choice. It was possible that every girl who put us as first choice after preference party wouldn’t get a bid to our group. It wasn’t possible any girl we invited to preference wasn’t a potential future sister.
The nicest way to interpret this system is, “we want everyone but there isn’t room.” It was true there wasn’t room for everyone and there wasn’t even room for the girls some of us really wanted. The big blowups I remember were when the whole group wasn’t willing to leave a girl on the invite list who had a personal connection to one of the members. As the lists got smaller, the conflicts got fiercer.
If someone we liked didn’t have recommendations, we got one of the alums involved in rush to write one for her. If someone we had no feelings about didn’t have recs, that was someone easy to eliminate from the next round invitation list. It didn’t mean we disliked her. We had to eliminate a certain number of girls. At the end, we were eliminating girls we liked. Mostly we really liked the legacies. We had to decide which ones we liked the most.
Perhaps I don’t understand what was really happening.
It doesn’t seem all that different from what we did 30 years ago. The only major difference in what you are saying vs what I experienced is that there weren’t so many legacies that we had to worry about a house full of legacies. The only bad blow ups was when there was a real-life blood sister in the house and some girls wanted to cut the younger blood sister. That happened twice as I recall and was not pretty.
But in general, there just weren’t so many legacies that one had to worry about crowding out others. I think there were maybe 1 or 2 per pledge class or thereabouts. Maybe that’s different today. My house is one of the ten largest nationally so it wasn’t a function of not having a lot of alums.
Thought experiment (a la Hunt).
In the last few years, there has been growth in single-culture fraternities and sororities (such as Asian or Hispanic / Latina), in addition to the historically black houses. I presume IU has these.
I can understand how a girl might want to find “her tribe” with people of her own race or nationality, especially if she was the only one in her hometown. Does it change the calculus if all the sorority girls in the book had inadvertently “isolated” the other girls because they went and joined culturally-based sororities?
PG and alh: It sounds like in any system there are girls who get cut out of sorority life period. They may get cut after the first round of open parties or at the last stage. Some because they don’t do the right things (have recs or accept all the invites) and some because none of the houses invite them back. Some that get cut from one house may go on to other houses, but others may end up not able to find a spot. At IU, it seems the percentage of girls that get cut is higher, but even at Tufts, NU or alh’s college, some girls will be left out in the cold. Is it really easier to not get invited to any houses after the first round than it is to be cut at the end? The bottom line is that it is an exclusionary system, whether it cuts 5% or 50% of the girls that want this part of college life. Not saying that is good or bad. Likely at a school where Greek life dominates, it could really impact a kid’s social life more than at a school where it has less import. Of course, it should never define one’s success or failure at college or in life.
PG: I don’t understand how your hypothetical relates to the book. At Indiana, a school that emphasizes and supports greek life, almost 50% of girls wanting to be in sororities are rejected. The authors repeatedly say they are only talking about white, heterosexual norms here. They are describing a white, heterosexual system. There is no real discussion of the NPHC. That isn’t the focus.
mom2and: I don’t want to see one girl, wanting to participate, excluded from a system that purports to be about sisterhood.
Based on a sorority’s popularity in past years, the number of women registering for rush and a rough guess about the total of women who will get bids, RFM sets a ceiling on how many women the house can invite back to each round. A popular sorority will have to release a lot of women after each round, especially the first round. A midlevel sorority will be able to invite more women back, and the bottom sorority, or a brand-new chapter, will have few or no restrictions-- they can invite everybody back.
This means that PNMs learn quickly that popular sorority ABC is not going to bid them, and they have time to investigate houses that like them. By the time preference rolls around, the system is set up so everyone who reached the preference round and maximizes their choices at preference will get a bid.
The system does nothing to handle the issue of all sororities cutting a woman. That can still happen. And as ever, a woman who has her heart set on one particular sorority that doesn’t want her will be disappointed. But it prevents a woman who would have gotten a bid from a lower house from spending all her time in rush at houses who already know they’re not going to offer her a bid. In actual practice, RFM places more women in sororities.
That’s not true. At Tufts, nobody gets left in the cold. By ruling of the Board of Governors, every woman who signs up and who has the required GPA gets a bid.
It turns out that in some big southern sorority systems, some houses have more legacies rushing than they have places. Or so I’ve been told.
So the popular sororities have to cut their invite lists more dramatically, earlier on, than the sororities that might struggle to make quota? The more popular a sorority, the smaller their invite list will be at each stage, compared to less popular groups?
How did girls end up at preference parties if the groups inviting them didn’t intend to put them on the match list? I didn’t even know this was allowed.
Is Alabama using RFM? A few months back I saw a pdf which looked like all the houses there were much more equal in size than I would have expected. And most groups were making quota or very close to quota. Is that the result of RFM after a few years?
ETA: Can you please explain it from a rushee’s point of view how she accepts all the invitations she can, at each stage, and doesn’t end up with a bid? In the non RFM system?
I’m sorry, I’m just having trouble following how this creates a different outcome in the end. I like the idea the houses that need members get to have a larger invite list. That seems common sense, once you think about it.
“Based on a sorority’s popularity in past years, the number of women registering for rush and a rough guess about the total of women who will get bids, RFM sets a ceiling on how many women the house can invite back to each round. A popular sorority will have to release a lot of women after each round, especially the first round. A midlevel sorority will be able to invite more women back, and the bottom sorority, or a brand-new chapter, will have few or no restrictions-- they can invite everybody back.”
ALH - it’s just like the concept of yield in a sense. The top sororities will have the highest yield back to their next round. So if the top house is Theta, the middle house is Alpha Phi, the bottom house is Gamma Phi, and each of them can only accommodate 400 girls in a certain round, Theta might only need to invite 420 to yield 400, Alpha Phi might have to invite 500 to yield 400, and Gamma Phi would have to invite 600 to yield 400. Those are made-up numbers, of course, for illustrative purposes. Apparently the ceilings are set for each group so each of these groups knows upfront that they can only invite X back. It was sort of done “unofficially” (the “bottom” sororities always invited everyone back who darkened their door) but now the RFM enables it to be more data-based.
Regardless of the number of places for legacies, the humane thing to do is decide early on whether they will be offered bids so that, if necessary, they can maximize chances at other groups. After second party is a good place to make that decision. After first party might be better but maybe too insulting. I am thinking this model may explain RFM if I can just concentrate very hard.
“That’s not true. At Tufts, nobody gets left in the cold. By ruling of the Board of Governors, every woman who signs up and who has the required GPA gets a bid.”
I defer to Hanna’s experience when she says there is something unique about how Tufts runs things, but the website currently says “if she goes to all parties to which she has been invited,” which is different from saying “she is guaranteed to always be invited to at least one party.”
It certainly would be nice if everyone could be guaranteed a bid, just like it would be nice that all 30,000 people who apply to Harvard got in 