Cornell Fraternity House History - Operating Environment

The Greek system has had to weather changes to its operating environment. Although undergraduate headcount has been relatively stable the demographics within the headcount have changed over the past 50 or so years. There has been a flip of the male to female ratio until it is now decidedly in favor of females. And increases in minority and international enrollments have placed further complications on efforts to maintain fraternity membership levels. Although fraternities have have had success tapping into non-traditional pledges the reality has still been a declining number of potential members.

The recruitment pool for sororities has tended to break even over this same time, what with greater absolute numbers they have less traditional candidates.

At last count Cornell University's undergraduate gender ratio is approximately 45.5% male and 54.5% female, with a total undergraduate enrollment of around 16,128 students. The graduate student population is similar, with a ratio of about 47.1% male and 52.9% female.

One would expect the absolute number of fraternities to have fallen during this time and the absolute number of sororities to have grown or at least remained stable. Yet proportionally sororities have actually suffered more, especially when factoring it the number of failed sorority start-ups during this 25 year period.

And while the fraternity failures have largely been caused by self-inflicted misbehavior which have extinguished both strong and weak chapters, the sorority failures have been entirely among the weakest. Gone are the days when a Sigma Kappa or Kappa Delta simply implodes when the arbitrary and reactionary nature of their national body is suddenly revealed. Sigma Kappa pledged a black student and Kappa Delta a Jewish student and the respective nationals recoiled in horror.

During these past 25 years, established national sororities AOPi, Chi Omega, and Delta Phi Epsilon went belly up as did fledgling chapters of Phi Sigma Sigma and Phi Mu. Alpha Gamma Delta's attempt had flickered out in four years. Only Alpha Xi Delta managed a successful comeback.

National fraternities with over three times the number of active chapters as sororities lost only six chapters; Phi Kappa Psi, Alpha Tau Omega, Psi Upsilon, Tau Kappa Epsilon, Sigma Phi Epsilon, and Tau Epsilon Phi. Theta Xi's brief attempt to reestablish itself is not worth counting and it was the system's only such effort.

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