Not sure where to put this, but I could see it turning into a debate, so I put it here.
In my view, college frats (/sororities) exist to maintain and perpetuate the cliquey high school social stratification of cool versus uncool, especially judging by those who join them. Where I’ve gone to school, they never really added anything positive to campus life, they’re just there for students to get drunk and party. The reasoning that they exist for students to make lifelong “connections” seems very tenuous, at best.
That’s certainly true of some of them, but by no means all.
It’s just a community, and people really have gotten jobs because the employer came from the same fraternity or sorority. It also provides a sort of surrogate family that gives you a support network outside your immediate family.
They’re not my thing, but they’re not baffling either.
For my college and from what I’ve gleaned from friends at other colleges, there are 2 types of frats/sororities.
The ones with weekly big parties and lots of alcohol and occasional drugs and whose members are generally stupid academically and lazy and the ones with students that don’t drink at all but are together for their major like female engineers or an intramural team or club but aren’t really sororities/frats and don’t have a house.
Kids in the former frats seem to be in it so they can feel belonged and for parties, especially at research universities and dominated by engineers.
As a guy, I’ve also only met a handful of sorority girls I would want as friends, much less date. The girls I’ve been interested in and went out with were pretty much all not in a sorority were, on average, were a lot more mature and sophisticated than the sorority girls I know or see. The fraternity guys I see are on the whole pretty obnoxious and childish too but I’m great friends with a few.
Some of the oldest fraternities were actually religious organizations, founded to promote morality on campus, and others were to promote academics, and you needed a high GPA to qualify. Others were modeled on Freemasonry, and while you joined in college, you were a member for life. It gave you business connections, which was a bigger deal before social media. If you could move to a new town, and find a network by looking up the local chapter of your fraternity in the phone book, it was really helpful. Guilds and trade unions offered the same benefit to people who hadn’t been to college, which used to be almost all people.
Obviously, many frats have deteriorated a lot from their original visions, and then, a lot were founded just to give opportunities to join frats to people who didn’t want to be in the religious ones, and didn’t qualify for the academic ones.
It is always fascinating to watch sorority girls though. They generally move in packs and it is nearly impossible to fail to spot one (at least here in the north) with their north face jackets, yoga pants, boots, starbucks latte and iphone out.
I think this debate could be expanded beyond merely “what is the point of frats” to “what is the point of college”. Does college exist to facilitate academic exploration and career readiness? Or is it more about drinking, partying, and easy sex?
As a society, we seem split between these two possibilities, and most universities try to achieve some of both. If we want to resolve the problems with our academic system (out-of-control costs, out-of-control frats, &c…), we first need to decide what the system is really supposed to achieve.
The part that amuses me is that the colleges describe the fraternity/sorority system as “Greek Life”. Aside from the Greek letters the closest they get to Greek anything is when someone orders a gyro from the local pizza shop.
Why? Isn’t it enough that out-of-control frats are bad enough on their own? Questioning purpose is, often enough, a good thing, but this seems like a long walk to get back to where we’re starting from. Besides, even if a college’s entire purpose was drinking, partying, and easy sex, that wouldn’t change their responsibility to do their best to control the misbehaving-to-criminal.
Abolishing the frat system is possible; a handful of schools have done so. But a university administration can only make such a large decision if it has support from most of its students, profs, and wealthy donors. If the administration can say “we have a clear purpose and this move will help us achieve that”, then there’s a chance of gathering the necessary support. But in my estimation most American schools are not driven by such a sense of purpose. They function more like businesses and aim to keep the “customers” happy.
In a perfect world, university administrations would deal smartly and directly with frathouse problems. They’d also uphold high academic standards and put less money into sports programs. This is an imperfect world, and administrators contribute more than their fare share of imperfection.