What is the point of college fraternities?

Great Debates
41

Could you expand on this? What are those advantages? I am genuinely curious.

In my experience, and I am only one instance, I have never heard of anyone getting/not getting a job or promotion due to their college Greek experience. If it is mentioned on a resume, that factoid is generally discarded. While not prohibited by policy, I would assume most companies would look dimly on a practice of hiring or promoting people based on this. I suppose it could be looked at as more of a networking connection, correct?

42

It’s interesting to look at non-college fraternities today like the Freemasons and how they are losing popularity. In days of old, being a member gave one a social network of friends who arguably would be willing to help out a “brother”. Nowadays, people have more social relationships but each of those relationships tends to be more casual. When you already have a lot of friends, there isn’t as much point to “joining” a fraternity for the purpose of getting some friends.

43

Phi Beta Kappa is an academic honor society, quite different from the Animal House style frats you may be picturing.

https://www.pbk.org/home/index.aspx

44

Fraternities are for those who are major contributors to fraternal orders such as Knights Templar and Freemasonry. they are there to let you get your moneys worth. honestly they are death traps for the rich. not even real at all. that is how those “rich kids” make it through college. their daddy sends them to school with a frat in order to ensure that graduate. and both the parents and the kids lose out. only really exists in rural suburban areas.

45

Thanks for link, but it does not really answer my question - what are those “advantages” sunstone mentioned? I agree Phi Beta Kappa is not a fraternity/sorority, but that statement of certain “advantages” is proffered for all kinds of groups, including said Animal House type frats, and I am interested in what those advantages are in someone’s career.

I have nothing against these organizations, BTW. Has anyone here who was part of one during college accessed some sort of advantage in furthering their career, or hired/promoted anyone from their fraternal organization? Just trying to validate this.

46

Yes, networking is an advantage, but it is a distant second to friendship. A simple answer to the OP’s “What is the point of fraternities?” is friendship.

As far a networking goes, if you are in a frat you get to know not just your cohort and people from slightly earlier and later years, but also alumni ranging from recent graduates to people your grandparent’s age. It makes the transition from student to professional easier when your world is not limited to your immediate schoolmates, and once you are on your feet in the world following your schooling, you have more contacts with people at various levels in the business world than you otherwise would have without the fraternity background. Alumni have a wealth of experience and wisdom that they gladly share with both students in the fraternity and fellow alumni.

47

Thanks, Muffin. That makes sense - ignorance fought.

48

Just to note that many universities have alumni organizations which offer the same networking on an even larger scale. State school alumni networks are more powerful in their states than elsewhere, while national universities like Ivy League ones are more widespread. You can of course use both.

49

This is gibberish.

50

Don’t 'cha just hate it when everyone is having a nice time at a party until some f!rosh on LSD jumps in and barfs all over the guests?

51

At least LSD guy has an excuse.

52

I’m not familiar with NZ universities, but that sounds right. American college dorms are also sometimes called residence halls. They are owned and managed by the school. A lot of schools have some sort of policy requiring students to live in the dorms for at least their freshman year. I went to a small private school where we had to live in the dorms all four years unless we were living with our families locally, but that’s unusual. At most schools a lot of students leave the dorms after a year or two and move into apartments or houses they they rent with other students.

Fraternity and sorority chapters often own or rent houses. At many schools this is one of the big advantages of joining a fraternity/sorority – you can move into the house instead of living in the dorms or having to deal with finding your own off-campus housing. (I assume members do pay some sort of rent to the fraternity/sorority.) The size and appearance of fraternity and sorority houses varies a lot; some of them are grand old houses, others are pretty shabby. The Wikipedia article on the subject has pictures of some large fraternity/sorority houses.

53

Georgetown doesn’t have fraternities. Neither, I believe, does Harvard, although it has dining clubs and other organizations (like the Harvard Lampoon) that serve essentially the same function, minus a clubhouse you can move into for a couple of years.

I went to UVA in the early 80s. The fraternity singled out by the recent Rolling Stone article had pretty much the same reputation back then. I wouldn’t miss it if they banned the whole Greek system, but I’m convinced the problem is much more deeply rooted and widespread. And I’d feel like a douche pointing at the frats saying “They’re the problem, not the rest of us! Bust them!”

54

Harvard does have some fraternities (and sororities), they’re just not officially recognized as student organizations.

55

Right. At least in the US, anyone, student or not, can start a fraternity or join a fraternity that will accept them. A small number of ultra-religious schools try to regulate off-campus behavior, but the vast majority of college students can join and participate in whatever organizations they want off campus. Even with the ultra-religious schools, the most they can do to you for joining an “unapproved” organization is expel you. What they need the school’s permission for, however, is official university recognition, which may be required if the organization wants to put up flyers on campus, use university-owned facilities for meetings, or set up a booth. So go ahead and start that Bronies, Furries, and Dopers for the study of Medieval French Fashion Support and Advocacy Group that you’ve always wanted to start. Don’t expect State U to let you just start holding your meetings in Jackson Hall and advertising in official school publications.

There are, however, laws regarding campus access that could trump official requirements for approval. At my alma mater, religious organizations were guaranteed access to the campus on Constitutional grounds and could not be voted away or anything like that. They could register for access just by showing up and asking for a reasonable allocation of resources. This applied to people like official LDS/Mormon missionaries who couldn’t legally be kicked off campus. You could ignore them (most people did), but that was all you could do. Free speech and free religion etc. Those exceptions didn’t apply to ordinary frat type groups.

56

That’s because “ordinary frat type groups” are closed to the public. Public institutions are only constitutionally required to provide free access to open groups.

57

A factual answer from probably one of the few guys here who actually was in a fraternity in college.

The obvious answer is yes, fraternities provide a formalized clique where you and 15 to 50 or so of your drinking buddies and live in a house, throw parties, listen to Dave Mathews Band (or whoever the sort of kids who join fraternities listen to these days), bang sorority girls, not pick up after yourself and spend your college years relatively free from harassment from the administration on a day to day basis.

Of course, the relevancy of being in a fraternity largely depends on a number of factors, including the size type of school, popularity and number of Greek organizations, the quality of the fraternities and so on.

I went to a relatively small (few thousand students) prestigious private college in the middle of nowhere. Around 50% of all males students were in one of 35 fraternities by sophomore year. So for my particular college, there was a bit of a sense of everyone having to find some fraternity (or nowadays multicultural equivalent). If you were a wrestler, you joined the wrestler house. If you were a nerd, you joined a nerd house. Other houses attracted stoners, football players, soccer/lax players, rich jerks who just looked slick all day, Jersey guidos and what have you.

Interestingly, there actually is very little point to joining a fraternity at my college if all you want to do is party. Fraternities can charge for alcohol and they all throw parties about once a month which are open to anyone (translating to around 2-5 Animal House style parties every Friday or Saturday night). I suppose the main advantage is if you show up and act like a drunk asshole, the fraternity has 30 guys at their disposal. It’s also convenient if you meet a girl. Surprisingly, I found I was able to hook up with girls from time to time without raping them.

No, I’m not BFF with everyone I was in the fraternity with. But 20 years later many of us still get together from time to time. Then again, I also have work and high school friends I get together with 10-20 years later. One benefit that because we went to a good college, a lot of my fraternity brothers are executives, lawyers, investment bankers, hedge fund guys, Silicon Valley startup guys, management consultants, engineers and so on.
My wife’s college OTOH, the frat guys are all half-wit meatheads who mostly go on to be gym teachers or salesmen for some local company in Shitburg, USA 10 miles from where they grew up.

58

In the United States, colleges and universities are essentially the same thing.

Generally speaking—but not a hard-and-fast rule—colleges are smaller and offer a smaller range of degrees than universities.

In America, we say, “Where did you go to college,” or “When I was in college,” We never use “university” in these idioms.

A “college” can also be an organizational unit of a university.

59

Yeah, it’s confusing like that. The terms are mostly synonymous in day-to-day discourse. “Going to college” means the same thing as studying at a university. In a more technical sense, often times schools that are formally referred to as “Colleges” in their name only award Bachelor’s degrees and “Universities” grant both bachelor’s and graduate degrees, but this is not a hard and fast rule. Some degree-awarding institutions don’t even have “University” or “College” in their names, but award degrees and are still considered colleges or universities. Examples include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Rochester Institute of Technology, The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Milwaukee School of Engineering, and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

60

One slight difference is that “college” has historically also been used to denote some vocational schools, like business colleges, where one would go to take a year or two of business and office-procedure related coursework, to prepare for occupations like bookkeeping and secretarial work. This usage is usually met with in older writing, but continues to be encouraged by the modern counterparts of these vocational schools.

Additionally, a few older secondary-level institutions use the word “college” in their names, e.g. Baltimore City College.

Fraternities used to be fairly common at the high school level, so it’s conceivable that one might come across allusions to a fraternity in a “college” that’s actually a high school. In California, fraternities were abolished from public schools well over a century ago. In 1935 the administrators of Los Angeles High School were still sufficiently concerned about this that they included a reminder of the law in their Student Handbook for that year. Perhaps it still goes on in secret, though.