Uh, it wasn’t exactly Harvard.
My parents paid for me (it was IIRC $15 in 1959). I got a year of American Scholar and was asked to pay to continue my sub. I never thought much of it and canceled.
When my son was elected in 1988, they caught on to the fact that we were now a multigenerational family. They sent me their newsletter (The Key Reporter) for a year or so and then stopped.
It was the kind of honor that, with a dime, would get you a cup of coffee in 1959.
It’s an honor, worth the $100. If you can’t afford it, tell someone at your school. Unlike the 8 million Who’s Who invites you get for having a pulse, this means something. If an applicant to my grad program is PBK, I give the app a closer look.
QtM is right. They were the first Greek letter fraternity in the US, established in 1776 at William & Mary. Became an invite only honorary years later.
I wish I was smart enough to qualify as an undergrad. Congrats!
If it’s $100 then that’s not the membership alone, it must be including the key as well. Where I went to school we weren’t required to get the key, so I decided to save money and just not get one. At that time (less than 10 years ago) the membership fee alone was only about $40. It may be higher now, but I very much doubt it’s more than doubled since then.
As for the legitimacy, I think a totally free honor society sounds more suspicious than one that charges a reasonable fee. A high fee would be even more suspicious, but PBK does not charge very much considering it’s a lifetime membership and you get certain benefits aside from just the prestige. Anyone who’s curious can read more about PBK member benefits here.
Aside from being a PBK member, I was also involved in the later stages of setting up a new PBK chapter at the university where I’m on faculty and helped to select our first batch of inductees this past spring. It has been something of a problem for PBK that they don’t have the same name recognition among young people that they used to, and the number of scam “honor societies” can make students suspicious about the invitations they receive. We were pleased that we had a high acceptance rate in our first year, although it probably helped that the university agreed to cover the membership fees for the first group order to help get the chapter going.
My bad, I’m still not used to the automatic nested quoting stuff.
Thanks for all the responses so far! I was just apprehensive because I have been approached by scam ‘honor societies’ in the past before, who only want hundreds of dollars for essentially no benefit. Perhaps my local chapter could do a bit more publicizing because I’ve never really heard much about them before they started sending me letters.
Yeah, PBK pretty much assumes that everyone has heard of them. I paid for my induction, but not afterward.
HEY!!! Remember the first rule of PBK for Pete’s sake!