Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
suppose it’s true. Here’s what the authors say:
Our results indicate that college administrators face an important trade-off when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus: while such policies may significantly raise academic performance, these gains may come at a significant cost in terms of expected future income for their graduates.
I’d argue exactly the opposite: ... Allow me to reframe the authors’ conclusion:
Our results provide empirical evidence that fraternities are just another way for social elites to keep themselves at the top regardless of actual performance. Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that college administrators face few trade-offs when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/09/new-report-fra...
I have not doubt that I would be far less successful if I was as socially self-isolating as I was in high school. Not just successful as far as career trajectory, but just a less effective contributor. Most jobs require team efforts...which require social skills to navigate politely and effectively.
It is from this perspective I find the original conclusion more reserved and purely based on observed correlations, while the second infers much (regarding causation).
Fraternities also prepare you for the ugly parts of the real world, though. The real world is full of elite clubs without meritocratic entrance criteria, and learning how to join one and function within one is certainly an advantage.
I would argue that removing this advantage from as many people as possible would make the system of society as a whole run better, though.
Being in a frat isn’t the only way to develop these skills. But lots of people coast through college without any non-academic social extracurricular exposure.
Nice stereotype.
This is not a correct statement based on the abstract of the paper.
The group of people that did not join fraternities does not consist entirely of "those rejected by fraternities", but those who are rejected and those who didn't bother applying in the first place.
This part is science: "After carefully controlling for all variables, we can conclude that the choice to join a fraternity has these quantifiable downstream impacts, on average."
This part is just-so stories: "That happens because . . . "
I know it's aggravating, but to insist on a high degree of caution in demonstrating a truth and then to insist on none when it comes to interpreting it lends reckless thinking an undeserved veneer of respectability.
I learned how to read a room, operate a night club, talk to (and avoid) police, be drunk without causing a scene, run meetings, talk to people to get stuff done, manage projects, and act normally in awkward situations.
I come from humble means - my parents couldnt and didnt pay for any of the (expensive) school I ended up attending. I ended up joining one of only two "wet" fraternities on campus (meaning we were allowed to have booze in our house), and the one considered the most social. I was (am) an introvert and didn't drink in high school or college until I was 21. I loved nearly every moment. Not once did wealth, influence or ability to pay impact our recruitment decisions (and I was deeply involved in the process all three years). In fact, we did more due diligence on "legacies" than any other candidate.
My fraternity brothers were some of the most dynamic and interesting people I've had the honor of knowing. It was the first chance I ever had to delve into real politics...as a member of the executive board, we dealt with some challenging interpersonal issues that I wouldnt have been able to wrestle with until much later in my life.
While my brothers were very different than me, I grew more and learned more while living in my house than I did in the rest of college.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. But there are also virtuous, powerful reasons why fraternities endure.
Would that be a better situation? I don't know but I personally doubt you would not have had the same meaningful growth if you lived in a hypothetical world where the social Greek system did not exist.
Yet, I don't imagine you would want to trade places with any of the guys you blackballed from your friendly club. Having been a navy fighter pilot, are you really going to try to tell me, with a straight face, about how hard it was to pay for school or fit in?
I was fortunate to have an ROTC scholarship (open to most Americans who qualify) which paid for tuition, but I paid it back in spades with the 10 years I subsequently gave in service. Perhaps that's unwarranted privilege - only you can interpret that.
No, I'm happy for you and glad you had the opportunity. It's just you started your anecdote about humble beginnings, and yet you had a full ride in college. You might not see yourself as a rich kid, but leaving college without crushing debt is something only a privileged few can do these days.
https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/class-of-2015-has-the-m...
It sounds like, similar to many popular people I've known, you have impostor syndrome. Despite all evidence to the contrary, you swear up and down that you're a square peg and an outsider. And you really believe it. You're not doing it for sympathy. I can clearly detect that from you.
Good research controls for stuff like that.
First, there's selection bias. We would only take guys that were really sociable, somewhat hard working, competitive, and with decent grades. Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is a myth. We would pick the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school. Money wasn't a factor. Neither was skin color, my house was probably 40% minorities. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half. Fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that. So are all the tech companies.... We only took the best. Yeah we drank more than most students and had crazy parties but we were also smart, hardworking, and had a lot of friends.
Second, the power structure closely resembles the business world, complete with budgets of over a half million even in a modest sized house. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
A fraternity is basically a non-profit company run by students. Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. I was vice president for several years and I knew hundreds. Maybe 20 really well. I knew people on the school board. I met the president of the University enough times that he knew me by name. The president of the student senate was a great friend that lived across the hall.
I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
First, there's confirmation bias. Our social group's identity was build around feeling superior, so we chose to value the things we were good at, and forgot about the ways in which we did harm to everyone around us. Also, probably a lot of bad things happened to us that got washed away in a boozy haze.
Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school, which has no impact on our being seen as "meathead rich" whatsoever. Money wasn't as much of a factor as I realized, as most of the bias was outside my control. My house was probably 40% minorities, which is a statistic I'd like to use to show how little I understand about racial inequality. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half.
It's really easy to get comfortable with being a fundamentally bad person. Just invert the emotional response: fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that instead of ashamed. See how easy that was? Also you can point to how other people do it too. Tech companies are elitist, for example. We were shining examples of virtue defined precisely in the way that most benefited us.
Second, power structures in the business world closely resembles that of our frat world. Despite this being a serious problem in society, it benefits me directly so I choose to see it as en example of why frats are good instead of why the business world has problems. Want to see how ridiculous the inequality is in the university world? I'll brag about some stats. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
I like to think of a fraternity as a non-profit company run by students of our personal selection. It doesn't technically turn a profit, but we do! That's what nonprofits are all about, right? Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration for some reason I can't possibly fathom.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. Let me check my facebook. Actually it was thousands. I was very important. I knew important people. I really like important words like "president" and "executive".
Eventually I had to join the real world and it turned out that being part of an exclusive club full of people who were taught for years to value tribalism and self-importance pays off: I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
FTFY
Go ahead and twist everything I say until it either refutes me or supports whatever agenda you want.
You can talk general shit about fraternities but the minority part really bugs me. Our house was more Asian and African American than it was white. Are you saying my house bought minorities for points? Ballsy. We took them because they were good. My best friend was 100% black and going for his PhD.
Instead of lamely forming your argument by copy editing a few words of mine how about coming up with something of your own?
It's crazy to me that your worldview is so deeply embedded with tribalism that you think your dad being a mechanic or your friend being black have anything to do with who you are.
The point about minorities is just that: by arguing that you're not racist because minorities are in your tribe, you're showing that you completely miss the point. For you, the in-group is your frat, your world. And being outside your world means lacking a variety of privileges in life.
But race is an in-group too, and maybe that's not one of the tribes you recognize, but for many people it is, and it's the tribalism that's the problem, not the fact that skin color happens to be a particularly easy and dangerous arbitrary criterion for admission into the tribe.
>It's crazy to me that your worldview is so deeply embedded with tribalism
And yours isn't? You just assumed this person is a "meathead rich retard" and a "fundamentally bad person" who "did harm to everyone around" because he's in a fraternity? Talk about unfair stereotyping.
>Wasn't trying to twist anything. Just letting you see how your post looks to someone not in your in-group.
You are trying to twist things. If you're going to be aggressively "anti-privelege" the least you could do is drop the smug moralizing and admit that you're pushing an agenda here based off of your own personal worldview.
Please start something (company or otherwise) that will make it easy for adults (young and old) to become part of a large, real world social network. One which will help them form good career connections, as well as platonic and romantic relationships. Fraternities create their own unique culture (traditions, handshakes, songs, idioms, etc) to tie people together, so keep that in mind. Please leave hazing out of it too.
Kindly,
Baron
Silicon Valley already does have its version of frats: companies. Alumni networks are the equivalent of a frat; working at Google or Facebook or another big company all have their own culture and opens up a lot of doors when you're job hunting.
At the end of the day, though, it's not a problem tech can solve. It's a people problem.
Ew, no. Work-life balance?
Now, of course, the fraternities can't say that that's why they're exclusive, but yeah, they're exclusive for a reason.
A fraternity (and the associated wider friends-of-friends social network) that consists of dozens or even hundreds of people doing favors to each other over the non-frat people, that's still manageable and self-sustainable. However, the world has billions of people. A network of million already is useless, and would leave the market open for another exclusive social club.
I think Vive Church [1] offers exactly what you're looking for!
-David
Churches are real-world social networks that are generally easy to join (the degree to which they provide large or strong networls vary considerably, of course.)
There are lots of other examples.
I'm not sure what the opportunity for Silicon Valley is here.
It's actually a thing that I'm a part of!
Check out Vive Church [1], formerly known as C3 Silicon Valley [2]
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/c3-silicon-valley-churc...
-David
While I don’t want to go into details, the basic idea is to use technology to track and bank reciprocation as well as the problem of in-group identification. I thought it was clever, but it just got added to my ever expanding good idea list :)
I'm only somewhat kidding.
Now that I'm done being flippant, there are other things like IVY which purport to be exclusive networks that give you access to events and networks that will help your career and social stature, but at their core any and all of these things will be businesses that will extract as much money as they can from all parts of their client base. Contrast that to a fraternity, which seems much less like a business, at least in the sense that the proprietors are separated from the consumers of the product.
All I'm saying is that SV's motivations in creating something like this may necessarily not provide folks with the same authentic experience that a fraternity would.
You filter yourself to high value people because they're more likely to be able to afford 10%. You have a sacrifice these people are making, and a reason to help others. If you help some random guy land a job where he's making good money it further your goal of increasing donations to charity.
(One major issue from the SV side, I think, is that the business models don’t align with the goals. A startup aiming to tackle this problem would probably need to be organized as a cooperative. See “Jungletown” for an example of what happens when community thinking butts up against top-down, profit-driven leadership.)
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xygykj/my-year-in... [2]: https://www.viceland.com/en_us/show/jungletown
When frat guys with names like "Baron" claim they have superior social awareness, this is what they mean.
"Elite" careers care a lot about GPA.
I, for one, have never put my GPA on my resume.
When a buddy of mine was interviewing at hedge funds, a few of them didn't just want his undergrad GPA, but also his high school SAT scores. He actually got shit from one of the interviewers because his French SAT scores were shady... the dude had a few years of finance experience and a PhD in theoretical physics. YMMV.
I think GPA alone is just a very poor predictor of success. There are a ton of other, much more important factors.
EDIT: "didn't help" might actually be "helped immensely", ha
Color me not at all surprised.
As a result, while it shows a correlation, it provides very little basis to reject that the correlation is due to a common cause rather than frat membership causing the income result.
What no one told me in Uni is that:
+ You're either tech or not tech, and not tech is not sexy in the valley
+ You need experience, no one cares about all the extra coursework you do, experience is king
+ Don't wear a suit to an interview in the valley, ever.
+ Your connections are invaluable, form lasting relationships, it's one of those weird things where not studying pays off, a lower GPA is actually good in this instance, and the bonding time with the bros is more valuable down the line.
> Don't wear a suit to an interview
> in the valley, ever.
I'm not disagreeing, I just want to know more.
A few bad fraternities/fraternity brothers give the institution as a whole a bad reputation, but aside from those bad ones I don't understand the fraternity hate. What's wrong with wanting to be part of socially beneficial organization that will help you make friends and party over the course of (some of) the most carefree years of your life?
These advantages, while enduring, are likely to reduce with time, in my opinion.
Physical stature and attractiveness are negatively correlated with academic performance? Sounds like you're repeating a stereotype. Can you cite evidence of that? (I have come across studies, e.g., Kanazawa 2011, that show significant positive correlation between intelligence and attractiveness. Also, frats are not composed of purely attractive people. That's just Hollywood movie nonsense. I've met plenty of unattractive and rather dull frat members.)
For people saying all the fraternity members being from well to do families, I disagree. It was about the same price as staying in the dorms. We had a professional cook, on site laundry, live in advisor (house mom), and a large yard. I think I paid $600/month for all food, board and utilities.
For better or worse, navigating the internal politics of a clique such as a college fraternity is often similar to what many people later experience in the wilds of the corporate world.
You also get a lot of practice meeting & building rapport with a wide variety of peers (both male and female), if your fraternity socializes frequently.
These 'soft' social skills are just as much of a factor in determining salary as technical ones. And for all their warts and downsides, fraternities do provide you with good practice. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to pay the dues, etc...
However -- more time socializing means less time for studying. So GPA goes down, but interpersonal skills go up. These new interpersonal skills pay off dividends later, though.
Just an extremely non-rigorous hypothesis.
You're going to read the same books and have the same general coursework at an ivy league as you will a state school. The difference is the people, including who is teaching you, who is learning along with you, and who they know.
Why claim causal link here?
Before getting too up in arms it's probably worthwhile to see what the actual paper claims.
"Researcher L. David Mech, one of the primary creators of the Alpha male hypothesis for wolves, later found additional evidence that the concept of an Alpha male may have been an erroneous interpretation of incomplete data and formally disavowed this terminology in 1999. He explained that it was heavily based on the behavior of captive packs consisting of unrelated individuals, an error reflecting the once prevailing view that wild pack formation occurred in winter among independent gray wolves. Later research on wild gray wolves revealed that the pack is usually a family consisting of a breeding pair and its offspring of the previous 1–3 years.[16]
Researcher M.W. Foster investigated primates and found that the leaders were more likely to be those who did more for those around them instead of being determined by strength. [17]
In humans, the concept of an alpha male was challenged as being largely nonexist as per an article by Dean Burnett, who found that human leadership roles vary wildly based on the current social context, and traits attributed to an "Alpha" might be exhibited in one scenario, and traits attributed to a "Beta" might be exhibited in a different scenario by the same individual. [18]"
Wolf behavior is mostly irrelevant in that context.
By looking at those students, you attempt to control for "interest in joining a frat" as a variable, and look at the outcomes for people with equivalent interest who either did or did not join a frat.
> In this paper, we identify the causal effect of fraternity membership on college grades and future income levels by exploiting time variation in the college’s social and residential environment. We use the presence of theme houses and non-Greek social houses and the presence of female students on campus, all of which may affect students’ choices bout whether to join a Greek organization, as instruments or reek membership.These changes allow us to identify shifts in he probability of fraternity membership that are plausibly exogenous and, thereby, to estimate the impact of fraternity membership on an individual’s academic and economic performance. We include controls for student human and social capital endowments to alleviate concerns that the policy changes that generate our instruments may have altered the composition of the student body. An additional advantage of using these instruments is that they are clearly choice variables from the perspective of the college administration.
very few people played a college-level sport and were in frats, for example.
They also say: "57% of alumni in our sample report belonging to a fraternity, which is somewhat higher than the 46% of all male alumni that were fraternity members. Greek alumni may be over-represented in the survey due to greater attachment to the college." While they mention this detail in passing, I find it quite interesting. Not sure what the implications are; it would probably require further study.
I'm also not quite sure I buy that people self reporting the amount they drink is controlled by adding their age and age squared as factors. I think it's natural to remember the "good times", which often coincide with drinking, but not remember the weeks you spent slogging through coursework. This, sometimes combined with a perverse incentive structure that says drinking is cool and you should do it more, may artificially inflate the self reported number of nights in a week spent drinking.
I also see a lot of people in this comment thread saying the increased salary is intuitive due to the connections made in a fraternity. I am suspicious of this. This is anecdata, but I was one of two computer science majors in my fraternity (of ~75 members). I have received no obvious professional gain from being in my fraternity. A number of my other friends who went to med school, dental school, and law school had to get in on their own merits -- fraternity connections do not apply to those domains (alumni ones, perhaps, but not fraternity). Others who got jobs seemed to rely more on connections between our college and various companies, not through our fraternity.
It's unfortunate that this paper does not control for college major -- they do when considering the grade regressions, but not the future salary. I would imagine the distribution of majors for people who are in a fraternity are different than the distribution of majors for those who are not. Perhaps those majors chosen by people in a fraternity, like law or business, tend to be more lucrative. Additionally, I can imagine people in some of the more socially conscious majors might be repulsed at the idea of joining a fraternity, and also do not tend to be the highest paying. I am being a bit broad and hand-wavey, but this comment is not a research paper -- just trying to capture my intuition.
Lastly, relying on my personal experience, I think a fraternity might improve qualities necessary for working at a company. Again, anecdata warning, but I became more sociable and confident after joining my fraternity; I also became less edgy, awkward, and bashful. I think these qualities are some of the intangibles that can help people get ahead at a company. Perhaps most importantly, you are forced to live and work with some people who you dislike, which is essential for being in the workforce.
All in all, I think it's an interesting paper, and I appreciate their work. It still leaves something to be desired though.
The difference mostly seems to revolve around whether sexism is brought up.
Here we are discussing men joining men-only organisations for networking purposes and the general consensus is basically "duh, that's how I got my job. Everyone knows that's how it works!"
It's because HN isn't a collective in the sense that we all share the same opinions (as much as one might reference the hive mind). There's a wide range of opinions, values, and experiences and you'll notice some piping up in one area and others in, uh, others. Add the wrinkle that we're all (well, likely mostly) human with all of the idiosyncrasies of human psychology that implies. We're perfectly capable of hypocri^H^H^H^H^H logical inconsistency. There's a lot of evidence that our rationality is there primarily to rationalize (in the truest sense) our intuitions and explain them to others.