Should You Pay for a Recruitment Coach?
An article came out in the Wall Street Journal the other day about how parents are paying between $150 to $4,000 for coaches to help their daughters go through sorority recruitment. Coaching services vary from watching a tutorial to get a leg up on the process to having a mentor coach you all the way through the Summer and being "on call" (that's the one that costs $4,000).
Granted, I wasn't exactly a big fan of recruitment (or what we used to simply call Rush) as it can be a very emotional and exhausting experience. But it can also be exhilarating meeting new friends and feeling a sense of community and belonging, which if we're honest with ourselves - we all long for. Joining a sorority can make a large college campus feel a lot less overwhelming and can create opportunities for leadership and connection. And, when you find the right house for you, it can lead to life-long, enduring friendships, which I can assure you, from my own personal experience.
But, paying someone to help your daughter go through rush seems like it could possibly have unintended consequences. For example, in a previous blog post, I talked about approaching sorority rush as authentically as possible and keeping an open mind about each house, even if it's not the most "popular." After all, you may have a richer, more rewarding college experience being a member of a sorority whose membership accepts you for who truly you are versus judging you on superficial measures such as what clothes you wear, how much money you have, and how you apply your make-up.
Approximately 125,000 college-aged women went through sorority rush in 2022 and 20-25% of them either dropped out or ended up without a bid to join a sorority, according to the National Panhellenic Conference - an umbrella organization for 26 national sororities. That is indeed a sad statistic. However, sorority membership is not for everyone and while the recruitment process can be brutal, at times, I feel it's best to approach it organically, with an open mind, and you're sure to find the group of women you can envision getting together with forty years later.
As I recently read somewhere just avoid bringing up the five 'B Words': Boys, Ballots, Booze, Beliefs, and Bucks - and you'll be just fine.
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