<p>"He is very involved in his frat and the fact that he doesn't drink hasn't stopped him from going to parties full of drunk college kids."</p>
<p>This is what I don't get. What does a non-drinker get out of such parties? Sex, maybe?</p>
<p>^he can hang out with friends, meet new people, and just have a good time. I have a fair number of friends who don't drink or drink very very little (nurse one drink for the entire party) and still enjoy going out to parties. Have you ever heard of people who "just want to dance"?</p>
<p>Well, sure, but not with a bunch of drunk people.</p>
<p>^where are you going to find sober people partying on a college campus?</p>
<p>I, personally, hate being around drunk people while sober. However, I do have friends who don't drink and still see them at these parties. Some people find them funny/amusing.</p>
<p>"Where are you going to find sober people partying on a college campus?"</p>
<p>I think that there's a problem with the evolving meaning of the term "partying." If you define a party as an event with heavy drinking, it's true that sober people probably won't be too interested. But I think people who are eating pizza, talking, dancing, playing games, watching a sporting event or movie on TV, etc., can be having a "party" even if they aren't drinking (a lot or at all). You can find sober people doing all those things, or at least relatively sober people.</p>
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on our hall group, a girl was anxious to rush a sorority since she was good friends with most of the girls in it. It seemed a shoo-in, but the national org wouldn't approve it because of her religion.
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Apparently, "background checks" were performed before girls were allowed in certain sororities.
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<p>There is no national panhellenic sorority that does "background checks" and they are all open to members different races, creeds, religions, etc. </p>
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And the drink of choice was grain alcohol.
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<p>Most IFC member groups have outlawed the use of hard alchohol, including in punch mixes, at parties - it's strictly cheap beer;)</p>
<p>So, yeah, things are different.</p>
<p>Liability laws are different, hence fraternities (and the types of parties they are having) are changing as well...</p>
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But I think people who are eating pizza, talking, dancing, playing games, watching a sporting event or movie on TV, etc., can be having a "party" even if they aren't drinking (a lot or at all).
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Most of the time when I'm not doing something academic or sleeping I'm hanging out with friends, eating food, talking, watching football/basketball, or going to a movie. I find that this is true for most people. I don't think that you can call this partying though. </p>
<p>For parents, if you have a dinner party, will you usually see beer or wine served? In my experiences you probably do. Alcohol is at most every social event you go to. If you want to go out dancing or to pick up girls (or guys) you either go to a club, a bar, or a frat party. </p>
<p>At my school some of the dorms tried to host parties/formal events without drinking. Very few people showed up and the ones that did were either blasted or bored equating it to a "middle school dance".</p>
<p>Watch a show like Real World. Those are recent college grads going to bars and clubs drinking every night. When I went to a luau in Hawaii the people running it kept telling us to go to the bar for a drink it's almost like they were pushing it on us. Maybe it's our culture that promotes drinking so much and we just see college kids acting it out. If you have no real responsibilities why not go drinking on a Tuesday night if you have the opportunity?</p>
<p>I've read very little of this thread so I don't know the particular twists and turns, but just yesterday we visited a university that is 42% Greek, and I'm pretty sure we'll not be visiting any more schools with that level of participation. Son ranked that school as the lowest of the three we visited. In fact, coincidentally I'm sure, he ranked the schools in reverse order of percentage of Greeks. Interesting.</p>
<p>Youdon'tsay: What was it about the greek school that your son didn't like? </p>
<p>I have been going back and forth about whether to visit schools in the summer because it seems like it would be hard to tell how the greek scene influences the campus life when most of the students are gone.</p>
<p>Already, I'll PM you.</p>
<p>As we have mentioned before, the percentage of greek participation is not a good enough measure on it's own to gage influence. What are the key social events at the school? Are they run by greeks? I've seen this dynamic at places with less than 15% greeks. Also, how open or closed are the greeks? Can everyone go to the parties or are the parties closed? (this is especially common for males - females can usually go to any party they want).</p>
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where are you going to find sober people partying on a college campus?
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<p>That is precisely the point of this entire thread. How can a prospective student who prefers less drinking, for whatever reason, identify schools where there will be sober students on campus...or at least students who aren't having alcohol blackouts, starting fights, and vomiting up and down the dorm halls and a regular basis.</p>
<p>I have a friend at Penn State who doesn't drink or party. He was able to shift through the thousands of drunk students and find a group of friends who have similar mind sets. When I talked to him over winter break he had yet to go to a party. I have other friends at the school who say it's one big drinking party all day every day. Clearly he is able to function without being part of the giant drinking scene on campus. He chose to go to PSU fully knowing it was a party school as an OOS student because he loved the academics and the football team. My gut says it would be harder for him to have found such friends (or as many) at a smaller school with a similar party hard attitude. </p>
<p>As I've said before, I have friends who don't drink but still attend drinking parties. It's not like non drinkers at party heavy schools are forced to sit in their rooms clinging to their pillows all night while hoards of drunks run through the halls vomiting. I also have friends who drink who don't like the whole frat party atmosphere and tend to avoid them. </p>
<p>I'll agree, I was someone who applied to college and was worried that most of the schools I liked had strong greek presences on campus. I didn't plan to (and havn't) join a frat. However, the way I percieved parties and greeks before coming to college was differenet than I see everything now after being at school for a year and really it's not that big of a deal. The question a student has to ask before applying to schools is "do I fit in to the overarching campus culture (partying or not) and if I don't do I think I can still find my niche and have fun here?"</p>
<p>The most involved kids at any college and university (even at low-Greek schools) tend to be Greek themselves. From class and student council officers, tour guides for admissions, student-alumni relations committees, many times the Greeks are participating at a much higher ratio than their proportion of the student body.</p>
<p>My brother and I each went to schools well-reputed for their engineering departments. My sister went to a state flagship. My daughter is at a Southern LAC. All of us went Greek at our respective schools. Each one of us had our horizons broadened because of our NPC/IFC memberships. My daughter's GLO has a more diverse population than the minority percentages of the school student body. Both my sibs and I had fellow members in different schools within our universities. I would never had had a chance to meet a musical theatre or comp sci major at my own alma mater, since we were so compartmentalized based on our major.</p>
<p>As a longtime active alumna of my women's fraternity (like most NPC orgs, we were founded before the word sorority was coined), I have advised active chapters of my GLO at very different schools in very different parts of the country. I have also been very involved in my fraternity's alumnae associations in very different regions. No matter where I go, I know I will be welcomed with open arms by my sisters.</p>
<p>Why is it that whenever someone is expressing looking for advice on finding low-binge and low-greek schools, the thread gets hi-jacked by the notion that there is something wrong with even looking for those qualities in a school. Why not just let the OPs look for the kind of schools they want? Why the sales job on the value of heavy binge drinking and frat boys to a college experience?</p>
<p>If someone said they were looking for a non-Catholic school, wouldn't you just accept that at face value rather than trying to convince them that they would really love Notre Dame?</p>
<p>I don't think anyone here is trying to say that binge drinking and frat boys are essential to the college experience. However, it is a reality at many colleges. The point I was trying to get across is that even though schools have high concentrations of greeks and binge drinkers, it does not mean that a non drinker can't still be happy there socially and have fun. It is in the same way you would tell a non catholic that they can be perfectly happy at a catholic schoool despite the religious affiliation.</p>
<p>DigitalCommons@Macalester</a> College - Audrey Peer: Binge Drinking in College is an interesting honors paper from a student at Macalester College. The paper does a lot of regression analysis and concludes that students who intend to drink in college choose to attend schools where there is a lot of drinking (which is no surprise).</p>
<p>But the author also concludes that, controlling for the student's precollege experience, students in fraternities and sororities drink more.</p>
<p>The bibliography of the paper is a mother lode of sources on college drinking. I'm not sure exactly which reference the author used to determine which colleges had more binge drinking, but Research</a> about Alcohol and College Drinking Prevention has tons of information on the issue.</p>
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It is in the same way you would tell a non catholic that they can be perfectly happy at a catholic schoool despite the religious affiliation.
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<p>But why would you feel the need to tell them that when they have started the thread by saying they prefer a non-Catholic school? </p>
<p>It's OK to prefer a non-Catholic school, isn't it? Seems like a perfectly reasonable personal preference, just like it is a perfectly reasonable personal preference to prefer a low-binge drinking school or a party school with a 60% binge drinking rate. These are personal preferences. </p>
<p>It seems to me like the only personal preference that is not permitted is the preference for a low-binge, low-frat social scene. For some reason that always triggers a bunch of stats on how many Fortune 500 CEOs were frat boys in college and how there is drinking at every college.</p>
<p>The OP was asking a question about the influence of frats and drinking on campus because many of the schools her son is looking at have high greek concentrations. What I have told the OP is that I know people in similar situations to her son at very greek and heavy drinking schools who are able to have fun and don't feel left out by the fact that they don't drink. </p>
<p>People who refuse to go to a high binge high greek school have the right to do so. However, someone who is not sure should see that non drinkers at high binge schools can be happy there.</p>
<p>The practice is somewhat limited geographically, but it is quite active in DC. I have a few openings I'm trying to fill right now for trade and an in house job for an international transactional lawyer. It is as active a practice area right now as any other - but we are in a downturn.</p>