Formal recruitment numbers for sororities associated with the the University’s Inter-Sorority Council have exceeded 1,000 new members this semester for the first time since 2009, according to ISC leaders.
Fourth year-College students Rory Finnegan and Brittany Bolick — ISC president and vice president of recruitment, respectively — said in an email to The Cavalier Daily that “the ISC has typically seen between 800 and 1000 women register for Recruitment.”
Finnegan and Bolick said that the application deadline for formal recruitment has been extended as well but not as a result of any recent changes in recruitment numbers.
“The registration deadline was indeed extended, and we are planning to extend it one more time during the Thanksgiving break,” Finnegan and Bolick said. “However, the reason behind this has nothing to do with numbers.”
Finnegan and Bolick also said that the main reason for extending the application deadline is to increase the ISC’s outreach and accessibility to women within the University community and that such efforts have resulted in increased recruitment.
“One of the ISC’s goals in the past year has been to increase our accessibility on Grounds,” they said. “The reason we’ve continued to extend registration deadlines, is to ensure that all women who want to participate in Formal Recruitment have at least heard that it’s an option. The ISC has been working hard to make sure that as many women as possible know about Formal Recruitment, and we really think that’s reflected in our increased numbers this year.”
According to Finnegan and Bolick, the price of formal recruitment has also decreased from $50 last year to $40 this year as a further effort increase the accessibility of the ISC. The fee to register is decreasing over the years, as it was between $75 to $100 in 2014 depending on when registrants signed up.
“The reasoning behind the price drop relates to our goal of accessibility,” they said. “While the ISC can’t do anything to change the price of dues set by each chapter’s national headquarters, we can make participating in the Recruitment process more accessible, hence our decision to lower the price of registration.”
“The ISC’s recruitment executive team set the price of registration very early in the year (before registration is even opened, and certainly before we have a read on how we’re doing numbers-wise),” they added.
They said that the recruitment fee is used to cover operational costs of the recruiting process.
Finnegan and Bolick also speculated that the price decrease would cause more people to register for formal recruitment but said that there was no data to support such a conclusion yet.
There is no way of knowing if there is a correlation between the increase in women registered and the decrease in registration price,” they added.
Finnegan and Bolick said that some fluctuation in the number of new recruits per year is normal and cited potential causes of variation in recent years.
“After the Rolling Stone article was released in 2014, the drop in women registering for Recruitment could certainly be expected,” they said. “Pledge class sizes from years prior would not affect the number of women registering this year, and last year’s pledge class sizes were not remarkably small — the only year they are smaller than is the 2015 pledge class size, which was an anomaly.”
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