Shenandoah University, a 150-year-old private school in northern Virginia, went looking a few years ago for ways to recruit students and keep them. Fraternities made the list. Some faculty feared cliques and a party culture, but a campuswide survey came back strongly in favor — and students who’d left had pointed to the missing Greek scene as one reason they transferred. “Some people felt they were missing out,” Yolanda Barbier Gibson, a vice president there, told the Journal’s Douglas Belkin. The school’s first sorority and fraternity opened last year.
It’s a national turn. An interfraternity association puts the share of men joining fraternities at 6.38% in 2024, up from a 2020 low, and says early numbers show growth picking up since. At least 10 schools opened their doors to fraternities last year, including some trying to enroll more men. Southern Methodist University in Dallas now counts 28 fraternities and sororities — three of them new this year, a 29th coming in 2028 — and nearly half its undergraduates belong. Molloy University on Long Island opened its first chapters this fall; about 60 women and 15 men joined, drawn partly by national alumni networks. The administrators’ explanation: a generation whose social lives Covid interrupted arrives hungry for close friendships.
The rebound is landing in a hard season. A September lawsuit alleges a sexual assault by members of a Cornell fraternity; Penn State authorities allege a drug ring was run out of a chapter house; authorities at Wisconsin are investigating hazing allegations at a fraternity kicked off campus back in 2015. Cornell’s Greek leaders have joined a task force on changes, and Ithaca has proposed a moratorium on student-event permits. The same Cornell lawsuit recalls that insurers once ranked fraternities “just behind hazardous waste disposal companies and asbestos contractors.”
Our read
This is a College Planning and Cash Flow (M5) piece, and whether to join is the student’s and the family’s call, not ours. Our job is the ledger. The brochure prices tuition, room and board; it doesn’t price the new-member and initiation fees, national and chapter dues, the formals and date parties, the apparel, the philanthropy expectations, the trips — or the chapter house, which may replace campus housing or sit on top of it. Ask the chapter for its written fee schedule, semester by semester, split into one-time and recurring, and learn what’s billed through the school versus by the chapter. The first year is often the priciest; plan it in the budget, not on a credit card. And given the headlines, it’s fair to ask the school for the chapter’s conduct record, too.
Two money footnotes. Dues and social fees generally aren’t qualified 529 expenses, and for a student enrolled at least half time, rent and meals in a privately owned chapter house generally count as room and board only up to the school’s cost-of-attendance allowance — check before you withdraw. And that insurance ranking wasn’t a joke: chapters’ liability coverage typically gets folded into dues, and parents should confirm whether their homeowners and umbrella policies extend to a student living away, and whether belongings in a chapter house are covered. Read the policy before move-in; it’s a poor time to hunt for the umbrella once the claim is raining down.