U.Mass Lowell is pretty much the same as described in liberty3701’s post of Princeton’s policy. They exist (I even helped found one), but the school likes to pretend that they don’t exist.
U.Mass Amherst on the other hand has a large number of fraternities/sororities, fully recognized by the administration.
At UML, they weren’t very popular as a percentage of the total student population, but for me, it was a great experience. 20 is members.
I attended a fairly large university (“Directional State University”.) It was a 2A school (as opposed to “State University”, which would typically be 1A, or a BCS school) . Practically nobody that played sports for the school team was in a fraternity/sorority, because there just wouldn’t be time. I imagine that this would be the case for any school of decent size. I think the coaches forbid it, but I’m not sure. We did have intermural sports: flag football, softball, basketball, soccer. It’s been about 15 years, but I believe that non-greeks could put together a team, if they got enough guys together; but we mostly played other fraternities. Some of my fraternity brothers were cheerleaders, and one was the mascot for a few years.
I graduated from the University of Hawaii in 2001. There was a Greek presence, but no one really seemed to really care. They were tied to majors-- all the science and humanities departments seemed to have them. As far as I know, none had any affiliation with sports.
I could probably have joined the psychology department one, but no one else I knew was a member and there seemed to be no tangible benefit to doing so.
Nude <=???=> Slut
Did anyone ever see such a picture or did they just hear about them?
A lot of it depends on where you go to school. These three that you mentioned were pretty much as shown on TV where I went to undergrad. Something like 40-50% of the incoming freshmen lived on campus back when I was there (1991), although it’s somewhat less now.
The vast majority of students were under 24, with 17-19 being the usual age for freshmen, 18-20 for sophomores, and so on. I can think of 3 people who were “students of non-traditional age”. One was a kind of dingy chick who’d gone to community college for a while and was a 24 year old sophomore, one was an older guy (45-50ish) who lived in town and went back to school, and the third was a Gulf War vet, who got out at 24 and was using his GI Bill benefits to go to school full-time. (we particularly liked Jeff- he’d buy us liquor and beer no problem… and he was an extremely cool guy besides that)
The majority of people at my school were there full-time, i.e. not putting themselves through school. Most had a side job, but it wasn’t paying tuition or anything.
FWIW… this was a major state university with upwards of 42000 students when I was there, and something like 46000 now.
However, the frat/sorority system wasn’t huge- I think there was something like 3000 students total in the greek system, including the black frats and sororities.
Also not buying it. My sorority was founded as a Catholic organization because the existing sororities at our founders’ university would not admit Catholics. With the help of the local bishop, they founded their own. It remained exclusively Catholic until the 1950s, and is now open to member of any religion (or no religion). Before I joined, I was introverted and painfully withdrawn. Now I’m confident and accomplished. I’ve served in many national and local offices and had many opportunities I wouldn’t have had except for my sorority.
My husband went to college in Texas and knew a lot of those slutty nasty sorority bitches. Then he moved to Ohio and met some real sorority women. And married one.
At my undergrad school in the south (UNC-Greensboro), the greeks had a visibility out of proportion to their size. My impression was that the guys joined thinking it was going to be like Animal House. There were also “Service Fraternities” that were community service oriented like the Rotarians. These were Co-ed. But although they were highly visible, they were definately not the majority. There seemed to be quite a counter-greek feeling on campus since it is a very liberal school and frats were seen as a right-wing bastion at that time. Frat and sorority houses were not permitted on campus but some frats had houses abutting the campus and some sororities had virtual houses by occupying entire floors of some all-female residential towers.
There are also Honor societies likeGamma Theta Upsilon. These aren’t really greek in that they’re professional rather than social.
I don’t remember there being as much of a greek presence at Appalachian State, but I was working 40 hours a week as well as doing grad school, so I just might not have noticed. I remember hearing that there were no sorority houses because a Boone town ordinance did not permit more than X number of unmarried women to live in one residence. This was an anti-brothel law, but it was used to preclude sorority houses.
You remember hearing an urban legend, then:
It really depends on the school - at the smaller, elite school that I went to, when I was there, 50% of the boys belonged to either a fraternity or a greek-like organization (far fewer girls - there were way, way more options for boys than girls). At the time, the school needed them - it simply didn’t have the room to house the students without the greeks. And just due to sheer numbers, they were a presence, no matter what else you were doing on campus.
Yep. Any number of national sororities prohibit their chapters from building or renting off-campus housing, but it’s for safety/security and insurance concerns, not because the city might call them hos.
I went to a large but experimental state university, and we did not have any officially recognized Greek organizations. We did have a handful of (mostly east-Asian related) independent frats and sororities, but those were mostly groups of people renting a house and putting Greek letters on it and not something with much of a presence in most people’s lives.
We definitely had a “frats are uncool” feeling. We kind of viewed them as a throwback, that only people who were so uncool that they didn’t have their identity and thought that parties with plastic cups of beer were the best thing in town would join them. A good part of this attitude is that my school was ultra-liberal and aggressively non-traditional.
A citation for one of the claims I made:
http://chronicle.com/free/v54/i46/46b01001.htm
More than half of the college students in the U.S. work more than 20 hours a week while they are going to college.
I was in a frat, but I went to a huge state school–Penn State, specifically.
My experience mirrors that of other people–with a big state school, most student life is dominated by the Greek system. Granted, my fraternity was a smaller music fraternity, we had instituted a lot of preventative stuff (no keg parties, no house, no first-semester pledges) on our own hook, and we didn’t belong to any overarching Greek organizations like Interfraternity Council so we tended to keep to ourselves. Our dues were a measely $75/semester, too, and I paid double that for Sailplane Club and got less out of it.
Had one hell of an acapella group, we did. Went to the national championship finals once.
These days the networking consists of rants on the fraternity listservs and occasionally running into a fellow brother (or sister, since we were co-ed for a few years after Title IX)–Phi Mu Alpha represent!
Interesting. I wish I’d known that when a certain blowhard at school was telling me the tale.
Another citation for one of the claims I made:
http://nces.ed.gov/programs/projections/projections2016/tables/table_13.asp?referrer=list
More than a third of students in college, grad school, and professional school are over 25. More than a sixth of them are over 35.
Puzzled non-American chiming in:
Why ‘Greek’? I’ve never heard that before. I know of the Greek names for some fraternities/sororities, but never heard they were ‘Greek’ per se…
Phi Beta Kappa started the tradition of naming college fraternities after Greek letters (it is an abbreviation of their motto.) Ever since, frats have been known as Greeks.
Thank you. 
Yep, even FarmHouse (one of the few fraternities that don’t use greek letters.)
None at Wellesley and Harvard, either.
However, MIT has many, mostly because they can’t fit everybody in the dorms. I hung out with the guys of Chi Phi, having a lovely time at their mansion on Hereford St. They were formed in 1873 and were the first frat to join the young MIT. 
That said, there is a big difference between them and the big Southern or Floridian and especially the movie frats. It was a lot like a dorm when the guys weren’t having one of their monthly parties.