“Summer season is prime time for prospecting and recruiting new members…There’s no reason that you can’t gain full commitment from a recruit to join (the fraternity) before the first day of classes.”
~ Pi Kappa Alpha (PIKE) Fraternity website
Within days or weeks of high school graduation, many fraternities are working to recruit potential new members the summer before they enter college.
Sometimes, fraternity members reach out to high school seniors in the spring, even before they receive their diplomas.
Early fraternity recruitment raises a host of concerns that incoming college freshmen and their families should consider.
Here’s what I wish I had known before my son, Sam, accepted a summer bid from Alpha Tau Omega (ATO) fraternity the summer before he died from hazing.
One family’s tragic experience with summer recruitment
Sam never considered a different fraternity because he was already committed. He never had a chance to compare ATO with other fraternities or see what a positive fraternity experience should look like because he didn’t participate in rush week.
And he didn’t get to hear the campus scuttlebutt from fellow students about the reputations and histories of WSU’s 25 recognized fraternities. If he had, Sam might have learned that ATO has a history of hazing, alcohol, drug, and misconduct violations dating back years before Sam set foot on campus.
Sam didn’t know any of that, and despite my efforts to research ATO, I also couldn’t find anything of concern. Just weeks later, Sam died at an ATO event where pledges were compelled to drink deadly amounts of alcohol.
University and fraternity leaders know the risks
University and fraternity leaders also recognize the dangers of summer fraternity recruitment.
WSU’s former dean of students told me after Sam died that she worried about summer fraternity recruits who did not get the same exposure to education, training, and messaging about hazing as those who went through the formal fall fraternity recruitment process after their arrival on campus.
Yet our family also learned that WSU shared its list of incoming freshmen directly with fraternities so they could reach out using students’ personal contact information to encourage them to join a fraternity.
At the University of Washington (UW), fraternity leaders told me that they feel forced to aggressively recruit pledges during the summer just to pay the costs of maintaining their fraternity houses.
UW fraternities race to get pledges committed and even moved into their fraternity houses in the summer months before new students are locked into a UW dormitory contract that is difficult to terminate. In some cases, that means incoming freshmen are living with fraternity members and other renters, including young women, who aren’t part of the fraternity weeks before classes even start.
(Panhellenic sororities typically don’t do summer recruitment, focusing instead on recruitment during a designated formal recruitment period. This recruitment period varies from campus to campus and ranges from the week before classes in the fall to the spring semester.)
Some campuses explicitly prohibit fraternity recruitment during the summer. For example, Texas A&M Commerce policy bans summer recruitment, stating that recruitment and intake of new pledges must occur during fall or spring semester only. Fraternities may not extend bids to potential new members prior to the first day of class.
Follow the money
Yet many fraternities and for-profit companies continue to go after summer recruits. Sigma Nu fraternity offers a recruitment guide to fraternity chapter leaders that suggests the chapter pay for two members to live in a big city to find and recruit potential members the summer before their freshman year.
Another Sigma Nu idea: Recruit potential members when they are still seniors in high school by inviting them and their parents to an event.
OmegaFi, a software company, advertises its member engagement tool “to help your chapter communicate during summer and coordinate recruitment events.”
Incoming college freshmen and their families should be aware of the financial incentives driving summer fraternity recruitment and do their homework before committing to a fraternity, including using our free HazingInfo database to learn more about campus hazing incidents and policies.