The North-American Interfraternity Conference (NIC) deigns to provide us with “The most accurate statistics of Greek membership ever compiled”. Still no references to primary sources, however – I guess we just have to take their word for it:
Now, 42% of the 100 US Senators is 42 people, and 30% of the 435 members of the US House of Representatives is 130 people. These 172 “Greeks” thus make up (172/535=) 32% of all US Senators and Reps combined.
Let’s compare these numbers with those from Drake University’s Pan-Hellenic Council (PHC) (Kozmik’s first link):
Greek % of US “Senators and Congressmen”: 32 (NIC) vs 76 (PHC).
Greek % of Fortune 500 Executives: 30 (NIC) vs 85 (PHC).
Greek % of those listed in Who’s Who: 10 (NIC) vs 71 (PHC).
It seems to me that somebody is, shall we say, “enhancing the facts”.
Let’s look at US Presidents, shall we? The PHC site claims “Every U.S. President and Vice President, except two in each office, born since the first social fraternity was founded in 1825 have been members of a fraternity”. Now, zut’s first link shows us that from Garfield (born 1831) onwards, the US Presidents have comprised:
5 with no Greek affiliation. 12 “real” (i.e. non-honorary) Greeks. 7 “honorary” Greeks (who presumably weren’t in a fraternity while at their college or university, so shouldn’t IMHO be held up as a statistic for pledge recruitment).
If someone tried to recruit me to their elite group using such falsified “statistics” as Drake’s Pan-Hellenic Council (and repeated at many other pro-Greek websites), I’d ask them why they felt the need to inflate what in truth must already be an impressive set of statistics.
In conclusion, to answer the OP’s question as to whether or not “a large majority of CEOs and Politicians in office were in fraternities when in college”, the answer appears to be a resounding “FALSE”.
Social fraternities and sororities adopt all sorts of greek-related verbiage. I’ve presumed it’s because their names are greek letters (although this isn’t universally true, see Farmhouse for example). Perhaps there’s some more complex reason I’m not aware of. Anyway, it’s not uncommon to hear fraternity and sorority members call themselves “greeks” and name their campus governing boards “Pan-Hellenic” councils. Gosh knows how far they extend the metaphor.
According to my own research, 100% of guys who were coerced into stripping naked in front of a group of their peers and shoving a stick of butter into their rectums while being pelted with rotten eggs were members of fraternities. Neither I nor any of my non-fraternity college friends ever had anything like that happen to us.
In addition to what Cranky said above, it is just a convenient way to refer to both fraternities and sororities with a single term.
Does anyone have stats on the percentage of college students that were in frats/sororities? If you assume that all CEOs attended college (not completely accurate), then it would be necessary to compare the CEO-frat-rate with the college-student-frat-rate where the delta between these rates would be the important fact.
In the 1980s, when I was writing for my college’s greek newspaper, I researched an article on how many members of the U.S. House of Representatives were members of college fraternities or sororities. As others have noted, I did not trust the numbers being tossed around by fraternity organizations, and wanted to do my own research. Using biographical profiles in “Who’s Who in America”, and including only social fraternities/sororities, I came up with a figure of about 25% of the House. Only about 10% of college undergradutes join a social fraternity or sorority, so greek membership is a significant indicator of future success, at least in the House.