Comment by Kevin_S | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kevin_S | Hacker News Reader

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There are so many reasons for this.

Self-selection of confident, motivated men is a part of it.

Membership/leadership in a fraternity is all about social contracts. You come to college with 0 or maybe a few strong social contracts, and students fail/drop out due to lack of support all the time. Fraternities provide 30-60 strong social contracts freshman can rely on.

Fraternities also (by way of current major makeup) select for certain majors. I was a highly involved business major, and recruited many other business majors into our chapter. We had 1 art major member.

The mission is to make you a better person. Most buy into that and do it. This leads to higher income.

If that's really the case, I would expect that sororities would have a similar outcome. Every sorority member I know (it's not many though tbh) would say the same things about it making them a better person and providing strong social contacts to rely on.

But the article says sorority members had no income benefit. There must be another factor at play. The author did say the lower age of sororities could be a factor b/c networks are less established, but surely that would mean there is no corresponding benefit for men in new fraternities, which I doubt is the case. Either way, they should do a comparison that accounts for age of org and study the effect at women's colleges next (especially women's colleges that turn co-ed, since that would be equivalent to their subject here).

I feel the most important aspect of fraternities is than that you gain a network of peers you can call upon in the future to advance your career.

Were you in a fraternity? I'm not saying you're wrong but I can't think of a single fraternity member who has their job due to some other fraternity member.

Maybe we were a weak fraternity but my opinion is that the higher earnings is due mainly to being above average socially.

A lot of people who were not in Fraternities "feel" this way.

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