I’m looking into Greek life as well, but I’m uneasy about it for a few reasons
It’s very racially homogeneous. I would probably be their “token diversity little.”
The membership fees are insane $500-$5,000 per semester. Depending on the school, it can be a lot.
time commitment 
juggling Greek life with school and a part-time job?
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First, checking out frat and sorortity instagram pages is a great way to see how diverse a school is.
As for joining I think we parents need to realize that the Greek system has changed a lot and will most likely continue to evolve. Their purpose when my parents went was to feed and house my dad, keep him out of trouble, and make sure he studied enough. My mom’s sorority gave her a safe place to live that had a strict curfew. Can you imagine a sorority today having a strict 10 pm curfew? lol.
When I was in school they were starting to flex their connections and the social. This is when the costs skyrocketed. I couldn’t afford one, but my HS best friend ended up the president of the best frat. It definitely helped him in his career, but those connections never were better than other connections.
Today they’re overwhelmingly social clubs. Philanthropy and scholarship are mostly an after thought. There are career connections, but those are for general business (sales) type jobs, and if someone joined other groups on campus they would easily have similar connections. I suggest you look at GPA and what majors are popular. Very few tough/demanding majors in the Greek houses. Us parents often struggle to see how much the Greek system has changed.
The future? Probably more and more a social and the hiring connections will become even smaller. My spouse has worked at a couple big tech companies including one Fang company, and being part of a frat or sorority isn’t a positive there.
ETA: rereading my post I realize that it sounds a bit negative. The social aspects of a good fraternity or sorority can be very valuable. It’s a system that is set up to help you find friends for life instead of friends for one stage of life.
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Wouldn’t they be more reflective of how diverse* each fraternity or sorority is, rather than how diverse* the school is?
*Presuming you mean the more visible aspects of diversity like race/ethnicity, rather than the less visible aspects like SES background.
For all of what is going on in our society racially, I am frankly shocked that fraternities and sororities are allowed to continue as they are.
Just got to you tube and look at the sorority advertising videos for any major university like U of Alabama. The lack of diversity is truly shocking.
And these are the wealthiest sororities with the nicest houses too.
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I could have worded that better.
You can get a feel for how diverse and unsegregated the school is by checking out instagram accounts of the frats and sororities.
However, if the fraternities and sororities are only a small portion of the students, then their level of diversity and segregation may not be reflective of the rest of the campus. Indeed, at some campuses, the fraternities and (especially) sororities appear to be less diverse and more segregated than the rest of the campus is likely to be.
I don’t agree with this at all. I was in a sorority and a good 25% were in engineering - at a time when only about 10% of the engineering school was women. We had a couple who ended up as doctors, lawyers, and business owners too. My daughter is in a sorority and she is an engineer. Most of her school is in STEM, so therefore most of the sorority members were in STEM. The president of her house was also president of the Mechanical engineering society, was on the jet car team, had a 4.0, and received four full scholarships to grad schools.
Not every Greek is a party maniac and uninterested in grades. Many student body presidents are Greeks (they get a lot of votes from the other Greeks). The Greeks can only pull members from the school, so if the school isn’t diverse, the fraternities won’t be either. If it is a big party school, the greeks will be big partiers too. But there are schools that are known for parties that don’t even have Greeks like Notre Dame and BC.
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The vast majority of colleges report fraternity participation rates of 1 in 5 or fewer and sorority participation rates of 1 in 4 or fewer.
Yes. One hundred percent . There are good brotherhoods and bad brotherhoods, but to say that there is a “type” of brotherhood is really silly and spoken of by someone outside the brotherhood. My fraternity brothers are my best friends to this day, a decade since the beginning of my freshman year.
Every year, usually in a town around the country, we reunite for a weekend of debauchery and catch-up.
Any time I’m traveling, I make it a point to hang out with whoever is in whatever city I happen to be in–even if that means catching a red-eye, or staying another night on my own dime, or what have you.
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At over 30 years since my H joined his fraternity, he has lifelong friends and is still an active part of the alumni association and scholarship committee.
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Agree with the posters who have said it depends – on the chapter and the members. My kid joined a fraternity at a major public university – something we were completely opposed to and had lots of conflict about at the time. I was really anxious about the usual hot button issues – hazing, alcohol abuse, sexual assault. But, his chapter at his school was fairly tame, and that was the group which was relevant to his experience. About 1/3 to 1/2 of the members were engineering, and there were plenty of driven, hard-working guys with high gpas. For my kid, it provided a group of guys he enjoyed, a place to live (and party,) and a lot of “real world” skills in managing various chapter and greek-life wide events. So for students, and families, interested or concerned about it, research organizations on the specific campus you are considering.
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You really have to do a lot of research. I know people who loved their Greek life experience. I know others who thought Greek Life was fun, but it got kind of old by senior year.
H and I weren’t in a sorority or fraternity and we still had a great time in college and made lots of friends, some of whom we stay in touch with today. That said, we both made plenty of good friends before and after college. To be honest, my closest friends are people I met after college.
Greek Life can be fun, but it’s not essential for a fun college experience. If you want to make friends and have fun in college, join clubs and get out and meet people. Don’t just sit in your dorm all the time. Also, put yourself out there: ask your roommate if they’d like to grab dinner with you, ask a classmate to grab lunch with you after class.
And as for networking for jobs: Greek Life isn’t essential for that. I know lots of people who weren’t in greek life who got great jobs right out of college. A friend of my D’s was in a fraternity and he didn’t get a career related job until a year and a half after graduation…
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My fraternity brothers are my best friends to this day, a decade since the beginning of my freshman year.
My husband’s best friends are also from college and he was GDI (God Damn Independent). Being in a fraternity has literally nothing to do with whether you will have lifelong friends.
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My freshman roommate was in a “top” sorority at UT-Austin. Seeing her experience made me really happy I hadn’t rushed (an alumna had offered to sponsor me, I think because she knew I would raise the average GPA of the sorority, ha). I made plenty of friends in my major.
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There are some very problematic issues related to the greek system, however for very large campuses, it does provide a place to live and a small community. Every house - and system - is different, so keep an open mind.
I really enjoyed my fraternity experience. I was a bit apprehensive at first going to rush just because there were some pretty high profile hazing deaths around the time I was a freshman. But overall I don’t regret it at all. All my best friends were either in my own chapter or other members of the Greek system. There is a pretty distinct difference between the social and professional greek systems. At least in my school, the hazing was known to be much tougher in the professional frats because they were not regulated by IFC but also could just be rumors. Highly rec at least going out and attending rush events.
Did you read this
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My spouse also has lifelong friends and maintains a great connection to the U, no Frat needed.
It can also work against you in the job market. I like to hire independent thinkers so frat/sororities types often don’t move ahead.
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Tragic story in the NYT today about a family’s thwarted search to find out how their son, a freshman at Cornell, wound up dead in a gorge after having attended an illegal frat hazing event that centered around a progressive, room-to-room drinking party that pressured kids to drink heavily. No one has been arrested, no one charged. Aside from the fact that, at best, the young man stumbled out of the frat house, got lost, and wound up falling into a gorge in a drunken stupor, there remains the issue that possessing, consuming, and serving alcohol when most of the people in that frat building were likely under the age of 21, is a crime in itself. And NO ONE has been arrested or charged.
Over and over, these stories are reported of young people, usually men, winding up dead after being pressured to drink incredible amounts of alcohol at fraternities. Not to mention the many stories of drunken young women being raped at fraternities.
There are so many other ways to make friends and connections at college. Our kids work so hard to get into these schools - to then lose them in this way is horrible. It must stop. No amount of charity fundraisers and potential future business connections is worth this. The Greek system is exclusionary by virtue of its very nature. It brings out the absolute worst in young men. It should be abolished, banned on campus, and membership in such should be strongly discouraged by the schools.
Why would anyone want to take the risk of losing their son this way?
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