No easy fix

Last weekend, you couldn’t walk a block on campus without running into packs of potential sorority women. Every few minutes a new cheer would burst out and, for women attending the 19 Party, it would all begin again. But for many, the question this year was, will this year’s 19 Party-goers suffer the same fate as previous generations?

IU’s sorority system is notorious for its selectivity. Forty-eight percent of women who start the process will not receive bids – almost a quarter higher than the national average. So for the 1,640 women who started the process last year, who came back early from Winter Break to continue rushing, about 787 found out they had received no bids from the sororities they had indicated interest in.

Some of them, according to a sorority advisor we spoke to, dropped out of IU when they didn’t get a bid, or even if they didn’t get a bid from the sorority they liked best.
Naturally, this makes the recruitment process highly controversial, and leads to reforms which will go into effect this year. The selection process will become more gradual, ostensibly allowing women more time to decide where they fit so that cutbacks are less abrupt.

But this still doesn’t solve the basic problem: an extremely large applicant pool all competing over limited space. One might even argue that making the selection system more gradual might just add to the pain of rejection, since applicants will have more time to grow attached to the chapters they favor – chapters which might eventually neglect to bid for them. 

To some outside the greek system, all this fuss over bids might seem like much ado about nothing. But one sorority advisor told us that, for many women, sororities can be one of IU’s main attractions. It’s only a misplacement of priorities if you assume that everyone comes to IU in order to get a high GPA – we have to respect that not everyone feels this way.

There’s something to be said for maintaining IU’s highly selective system – that it is highly selective because it works well, and vice versa. An organization’s selectivity makes membership in it more desirable, and giving IU’s sorority system a large applicant pool ensures that each sorority receives the applicants that will serve it best.

In the end, there’s no good way to solve IU’s sorority-selection problem. Space is limited, and sororities won’t agree to systems that reduce their ability to select the members they prefer. Limiting the size of the applicant pool is simply more rejection.

In the end, all you can do is ensure that sorority-hopefuls know what they’re getting into, and support them along the way.