Virtual Recruitment

[BlueBayou]

Originally Posted by carnation

Do any colleges or Panhellenics ever list how many new members actually made it to initiation or even how many accepted their bids? I think that retention should be a big part of studying RFM.

I agree that looking at the stats is important.

Back in the dark ages, we for sure tracked stuff like this on a chapter level.

We were a deferred spring recruitment and you did not get initiated until the following fall. Our chapter had the highest GPA. For the most part a PMN's GPA was an Apples to Apples comparison. Not looking at all sorts of different high schools etc. You kinda knew what you could expect in terms of college grade performance.

My first year on the active side of recruitment, there was a little grumbling in the ranks from older actives. While the alums lowered our GPA requirement slightly - They eliminated SRs or Scholarship Risks. Best I could tell - we use to be allowed to take like 5 or 7% of a pledge class below the GPA threshold. Like if the GPA threshold was 2.75 you could take a few girls that were the 2.5 to 2.75 range. We had 5 rounds of parties and it was generally known that if you had a reference/recommendation your would be asked back to the first round of invitationals. I did not realize that the "courtesy" served an important purpose. Our GPA requirements and one other sororities on campus were significantly higher than the other groups. If we cut everyone that did not have our grades first round - our parties would be too empty.

Apparently what ended up happening when we allowed SRs is that instead of focusing on "top rushees" the chapter members spent a lot of time advocating for which SR they wanted. (There were a lot of great girls that did not meet our grade standards). And guess what? The SR's we pledged made up most of our "holdovers" - the girls that could not be initiated with their pledge class because they did not make their grades their pledge semester.

Our Alums looked at it from a cold, dispassionate data perspective and said enough. Moving forward they set very odd GPA thresholds. It changed every rush and was based of the mean or median GPA of the girls going through recruitment that particular semester. GPAs like 2.568. So 2.569 was okay but 2.567 was a no go.