From personal experience, joining a fraternity definitely affected my grades negatively. I ended up graduating with around a 3.1 after a few rough semesters far below that. Having said that, the connections I made have been absolutely invaluable and I'd attribute all of the success I've had in my career to either my work experience as a student or the relationships I made in the frat.
Hell, I wasn't even in a frat, but my success since college had little to do with GPA (< 3.0), and mainly to do with work experience, open source work, and connections that lead to introductions and interviews.
I think GPA alone is just a very poor predictor of success. There are a ton of other, much more important factors.
Oh absolutely. Having older members come back after graduation to tell everyone how true this is didn't help, we all knew practically from the get go that we needed to focus on things like internships and leadership experience rather than class.
EDIT: "didn't help" might actually be "helped immensely", ha
Unless you're already about to fail, few, if any, employers will care about your GPA, and joining a large network of college graduates who share camaraderie can't hurt when it comes to finding well paying positions and moving up in organizations
I can guarantee no one really cares about your GPA, especially after your first job. If it's your only proof of competency/intelligence that's been validated by a third-party, they'll care, but if you have other outside evidence and interview well, no one will ever even think to ask, even in elite settings.
> I can guarantee no one really cares about your GPA
When a buddy of mine was interviewing at hedge funds, a few of them didn't just want his undergrad GPA, but also his high school SAT scores. He actually got shit from one of the interviewers because his French SAT scores were shady... the dude had a few years of finance experience and a PhD in theoretical physics. YMMV.
These are "generalized careers" so they have to grasp at arbitrary cues that vouch for intelligence and competence. Careers that require specialized tasks don't look at generalized grade averages or test scores of non-relevant backgrounds like "French SAT" for a "hedge fund" job.
Indeed. Certain institutions will not even consider a candidate who has not gone to a top tier University AND graduated with 3.5 or greater, unless of course they have some sort of connection with someone working at that institution.
For first job out of college
I've seen certain institutions want "elite" job experience, degree from top school, high GPA, and sometimes high test scores. This is not for the first job.
BoorishBears is correct if and only if you are a mediocre talent and you seek a mediocre career.
If you have great talent and seek a great career, then a high GPA will make it substantially easier to get (and to pass) interviews at top-tier employers, and to get into the most competitive areas within those firms. This will, in-turn, have positive knock-on effects for your future career.
It is possible to succeed greatly with any GPA. It is much simpler with a good GPA.
Hyper-socialization can teach a lot of "soft skills" which come in useful in the business world. Whether it's a fraternity, a sorority, military boot camp, or similar experience, this influence may account for some of the data.
If you don't care about GPA, why do you need me to be a college graduate? I'm genuinely confused about the point of college. I can spend four years drinking and partying without going into debt if that's what I need to get a job.
"Researcher L. David Mech, one of the primary creators of the Alpha male hypothesis for wolves, later found additional evidence that the concept of an Alpha male may have been an erroneous interpretation of incomplete data and formally disavowed this terminology in 1999. He explained that it was heavily based on the behavior of captive packs consisting of unrelated individuals, an error reflecting the once prevailing view that wild pack formation occurred in winter among independent gray wolves. Later research on wild gray wolves revealed that the pack is usually a family consisting of a breeding pair and its offspring of the previous 1–3 years.[16]
Researcher M.W. Foster investigated primates and found that the leaders were more likely to be those who did more for those around them instead of being determined by strength. [17]
In humans, the concept of an alpha male was challenged as being largely nonexist as per an article by Dean Burnett, who found that human leadership roles vary wildly based on the current social context, and traits attributed to an "Alpha" might be exhibited in one scenario, and traits attributed to a "Beta" might be exhibited in a different scenario by the same individual. [18]"
My kid likes the show "Adam Ruins Everything," which is a myth debunking show. He went over the same things you just stated. The concept of "Alpha male" was all hype that just stuck.
The researcher who coined the term "alpha male" for wolves later rescinded any claim to the term's validity. Turned out he was studying "packs" of random wolves kept in captivity, and the "fights for dominance" were actually territorial disputes between unrelated wolves. Packs in the wild consist of an elder mated pair and their adult children. So in the wild, "alpha wolf" is more like "grandpa or grandma wolf".
He's disputing the belief that there is such a thing as an "alpha" male type, outside and beyond the circular definition that anyone who is a "winner" in life is an alpha male; I suspect the belief that this is real is (rightly or wrongly) so thoroughly embedded that people don't notice themselves believing in it without having checked the evidence.
It is slightly strange. The related concept of 'type A' vs 'type B' personalities is useful (even if not backed by science) to bucket people based on their general behavior. But only with men do we take that single step further and say that the 'type A'-ness is actually an intrinsic property of their being instead of just a way they behave.
Look at the article. Even just the abstract. It claims that changes at Northwestern's campus meant that a type of student who previously didn't join frats started to join frats.
By looking at those students, you attempt to control for "interest in joining a frat" as a variable, and look at the outcomes for people with equivalent interest who either did or did not join a frat.
> In this paper, we identify the causal effect of fraternity membership on college grades and future income levels by exploiting time variation in the college’s social and residential environment. We use the presence of theme houses and non-Greek social houses and the presence of female students on campus, all of which may affect students’ choices bout whether to join a Greek organization, as instruments or reek membership.These changes allow us to identify shifts in he probability of fraternity membership that are plausibly exogenous and, thereby, to estimate the impact of fraternity membership on an individual’s academic and economic performance. We include controls for student human and social capital endowments to alleviate concerns that the policy changes that generate our instruments may have altered the composition of the student body. An additional advantage of using these instruments is that they are clearly choice variables from the perspective of the college administration.
They claim they identify causality but I don't see how that's possible based on what's written here. The presence (or lack thereof) of frats is going to change the applicant pool to begin with. And once they are present, there are going to be differences between who applies to be in a frat and who doesn't.
Agreed (not necessarily on the alpha male bit), I don't see how they can claim a causal link with just survey data. Correlation, sure, but even that's questionable with self-reported data.
i knew plenty of non-alpha types in frats. lots of fairly nerdy guys, in fact. it's more about coming from a wealthy family that recognizes the value in such things.
very few people played a college-level sport and were in frats, for example.
Not surprising. Fraternities engage in many nonacademic activities which could lead to a lower GPA, but they also come with a very large social network and series of connections which help members find jobs and further career options.
All the frat guys I ever knew had well off parents. They were going to make more than everyone else due to that alone. Of course, being surrounded by privilege, parties, and sorority girls eager to score a rich boy hurt their grades. That doesn't really matter though. They graduated. Some even took an extra year or two to do that. It didn't matter. They did fine. Being a prince has advantages.
The fraternity I was in charged about $175 a quarter. We didn't have a house yet, as a newer fraternity, so several of us rented a house together. Usually, 5 of us lived in the house, so we split rent 6 ways, and fraternity dues paid a 6th person's share of the rent. We ran college parties as fundraisers, charging $5 for unlimited beer and "jungle juice". (We started at $5, then shrewd bros would raise the price near $30 by midnight.)
I learned how to read a room, operate a night club, talk to (and avoid) police, be drunk without causing a scene, run meetings, talk to people to get stuff done, manage projects, and act normally in awkward situations.
Joining a fraternity was one of the most meaningful and impactful experiences of my life.
I come from humble means - my parents couldnt and didnt pay for any of the (expensive) school I ended up attending. I ended up joining one of only two "wet" fraternities on campus (meaning we were allowed to have booze in our house), and the one considered the most social. I was (am) an introvert and didn't drink in high school or college until I was 21. I loved nearly every moment. Not once did wealth, influence or ability to pay impact our recruitment decisions (and I was deeply involved in the process all three years). In fact, we did more due diligence on "legacies" than any other candidate.
My fraternity brothers were some of the most dynamic and interesting people I've had the honor of knowing. It was the first chance I ever had to delve into real politics...as a member of the executive board, we dealt with some challenging interpersonal issues that I wouldnt have been able to wrestle with until much later in my life.
While my brothers were very different than me, I grew more and learned more while living in my house than I did in the rest of college.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. But there are also virtuous, powerful reasons why fraternities endure.
By joining a fraternity despite being from humble means I'm almost certain you're someone who would have sought social connections even without. And you'd likely end up into an academic or an athletic or an interest based group where you'd build similar connections. The difference would be that the arbiters of who joined your club would base their decisions on your skills/interests/passions as opposed to your drinking skills during rush.
Would that be a better situation? I don't know but I personally doubt you would not have had the same meaningful growth if you lived in a hypothetical world where the social Greek system did not exist.
Perhaps, although in my particular case, I joined because I applied for a scholarship the house sponsored - and it was the only house I rushed. I spent most of my time holed up in my room the first quarter except for rush events I was explicitly invited to. And that chosen preference for isolation continued in the house as well. But simply being there forced me / gave me the opportunity to walk downstairs and be immersed in a sea of fascinating people. It really was the thing that taught me how to build relationships across differences.
Philanthropic fund raisers. Supporting university life and other on-campus events. Risk reduction at parties. Being dependable and loyal. Learning to navigate and manage a small business by managing chapter affairs. Learning to separate the talkers from the doers. Being there for your buddies through deaths, divorces, cancer, and other hard times. Positive peer pressure to make the chapter look good.
No, these positives aren't unique to Greek life, and yes, there are shenanigans too, sometimes worse. Sorry to hear about your negative experience. I hope it was only a vocal minority who were acting so terribly.
To the suggestion in the title of this post, there's more to a product than the technology, and I say that as a technical person. Education is important, but most of it takes place outside the classroom. None of us does it alone.
>Not once did wealth, influence or ability to pay impact our recruitment decisions
Yet, I don't imagine you would want to trade places with any of the guys you blackballed from your friendly club. Having been a navy fighter pilot, are you really going to try to tell me, with a straight face, about how hard it was to pay for school or fit in?
Despite the stereotypes around my first chosen profession, I always felt like an outsider within it, even though I loved it. I've always been a bit of an odd duck. And any organization - even the school I attended! - makes choices about who can and cannot attend. I'm happy to share my resume of failures if you'd like to know all the places I've been "blackballed" from!
I was fortunate to have an ROTC scholarship (open to most Americans who qualify) which paid for tuition, but I paid it back in spades with the 10 years I subsequently gave in service. Perhaps that's unwarranted privilege - only you can interpret that.
>Perhaps that's unwarranted privilege - only you can interpret that.
No, I'm happy for you and glad you had the opportunity. It's just you started your anecdote about humble beginnings, and yet you had a full ride in college. You might not see yourself as a rich kid, but leaving college without crushing debt is something only a privileged few can do these days.
It sounds like, similar to many popular people I've known, you have impostor syndrome. Despite all evidence to the contrary, you swear up and down that you're a square peg and an outsider. And you really believe it. You're not doing it for sympathy. I can clearly detect that from you.
Please start something (company or otherwise) that will make it easy for adults (young and old) to become part of a large, real world social network. One which will help them form good career connections, as well as platonic and romantic relationships. Fraternities create their own unique culture (traditions, handshakes, songs, idioms, etc) to tie people together, so keep that in mind. Please leave hazing out of it too.
Doesn't that already exist? It's not a technology problem. There's everything from Meetup.com to Facebook groups/events to private Slack channels to Tinder for dates to Reddit to so many other things.
Silicon Valley already does have its version of frats: companies. Alumni networks are the equivalent of a frat; working at Google or Facebook or another big company all have their own culture and opens up a lot of doors when you're job hunting.
At the end of the day, though, it's not a problem tech can solve. It's a people problem.
Making it easy defeats the entire point of something like a fraternity: excluding the less valuable and less committed people from the social space so that the high-value and committed people that remain can efficiently use their time.
Now, of course, the fraternities can't say that that's why they're exclusive, but yeah, they're exclusive for a reason.
Why can't they say that? Because that sounds exactly like what their parent organization (the university), does every year. This thread seems to be really down on the exclusivity part, but I feel I'm taking crazy pills, because this is happening at universities!! All of pledges just went through a very judgemental, exclusive selection of elites...and they one that round. A further selection process is now abhorrent?
Problem is that the useful societal networks as described by e.g. the other comment below [0] are naturally scarce resources.
A fraternity (and the associated wider friends-of-friends social network) that consists of dozens or even hundreds of people doing favors to each other over the non-frat people, that's still manageable and self-sustainable. However, the world has billions of people. A network of million already is useless, and would leave the market open for another exclusive social club.
Who wants to join a group that will let anybody in? It's a very basic aspect of human psychology that shared sacrifice (real or perceived) leads to stronger social bonds.
Who wants to join a group that will let anybody in? The majority of the human species that participates in organised religious groups that let anybody in who can recite a credo or a shahada...
(Of course there is still sacrifice - they all have arbitrary rules and constraints to lead to shared hardship and to create the essential us-vs-them.)
> Please start something (company or otherwise) that will make it easy for adults (young and old) to become part of a large, real world social network.
Churches are real-world social networks that are generally easy to join (the degree to which they provide large or strong networls vary considerably, of course.)
There are lots of other examples.
I'm not sure what the opportunity for Silicon Valley is here.
I miss church but not religion, sometimes it's nice to just eat some donuts and chat with random people. Sadly I can't do a startup where people just eat donuts and chill
I actually have a rather good idea on how to do this. I was looking to solve the problem of religion, not frats, but in many ways frats and religions are very similar problems.
While I don’t want to go into details, the basic idea is to use technology to track and bank reciprocation as well as the problem of in-group identification. I thought it was clever, but it just got added to my ever expanding good idea list :)
This has been near the top of my "app ideas" notebook for 10 years, and I've never found any serious attempt out there. I view this as a game theory problem, whose solution would be facilitated by a social network that modeled whatever the problem is. If it ever succeeded, it would probably be in continual hazard of turning into that Black Mirror episode about reputation scores.
Now that I'm done being flippant, there are other things like IVY which purport to be exclusive networks that give you access to events and networks that will help your career and social stature, but at their core any and all of these things will be businesses that will extract as much money as they can from all parts of their client base. Contrast that to a fraternity, which seems much less like a business, at least in the sense that the proprietors are separated from the consumers of the product.
All I'm saying is that SV's motivations in creating something like this may necessarily not provide folks with the same authentic experience that a fraternity would.
I always thought a group based around the giving pledge would be great.
You filter yourself to high value people because they're more likely to be able to afford 10%. You have a sacrifice these people are making, and a reason to help others. If you help some random guy land a job where he's making good money it further your goal of increasing donations to charity.
I think projects like Latitude[1] and Kalu Yala[2], while easy to poke fun of as examples of Silicon Valley out-of-touchness, also reveal the deep longing many of us have for genuine, spontaneous community interaction. I lived in a student co-op in college and it was the most significant social event of my life; how I wish there were more avenues in the “real” world to live, laugh, and love in a community of equals under the same roof!
(One major issue from the SV side, I think, is that the business models don’t align with the goals. A startup aiming to tackle this problem would probably need to be organized as a cooperative. See “Jungletown” for an example of what happens when community thinking butts up against top-down, profit-driven leadership.)
The best “fraternity” I ever joined was ROTC. My GPA went up half a point, I got in shape, learned a lot about leadership, and made some life-long friends.
+ You're either tech or not tech, and not tech is not sexy in the valley
+ You need experience, no one cares about all the extra coursework you do, experience is king
+ Don't wear a suit to an interview in the valley, ever.
+ Your connections are invaluable, form lasting relationships, it's one of those weird things where not studying pays off, a lower GPA is actually good in this instance, and the bonding time with the bros is more valuable down the line.
I'm a recruiter who doesn't work with any companies in the Valley, and I'm curious about this:
> Don't wear a suit to an interview
> in the valley, ever.
Really? Almost everywhere else in the world, not wearing a suit to an interview is a weak negative signal, as it shows you're unlikely to be able to put up with even small amounts of the inherent corporate bullshit that occurs in companies. Even if you'll never wear a suit once employed.
I think this is generally the case for tech companies in the United States and for startups around the world. Personally, I can't name a single tech company where interviewees are expected to wear suits to interviews. If there are any such bona fide tech companies (versus companies with tech teams), I imagine they're older corporations.
It's a cultural fit, most SV companies don't do suits, it's just not part of the culture. So if you go and interview with a company, and no one's wearing suits, it makes it look like you're not going to fit in if you are wearing one. It's almost seen as over compensating for lack of technical skills or knowledge by wearing a suit, at least that was my impression.
Not surprised. I was in a fraternity, and no we didn't haze at all. Between all the events (of which less than a third are parties) and dedication it takes to keep the thing from barreling into the ground you learn a lot of real life skills.
First, there's selection bias. We would only take guys that were really sociable, somewhat hard working, competitive, and with decent grades. Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is a myth. We would pick the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school. Money wasn't a factor. Neither was skin color, my house was probably 40% minorities. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half. Fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that. So are all the tech companies.... We only took the best. Yeah we drank more than most students and had crazy parties but we were also smart, hardworking, and had a lot of friends.
Second, the power structure closely resembles the business world, complete with budgets of over a half million even in a modest sized house. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
A fraternity is basically a non-profit company run by students. Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. I was vice president for several years and I knew hundreds. Maybe 20 really well. I knew people on the school board. I met the president of the University enough times that he knew me by name. The president of the student senate was a great friend that lived across the hall.
I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
Not surprised. I was in a fraternity, and no we didn't haze at all. Between all the events (of which less than a third are parties) and dedication it takes to keep the thing from barreling into the ground you learn some basic lifeskills and some harmful worldviews.
First, there's confirmation bias. Our social group's identity was build around feeling superior, so we chose to value the things we were good at, and forgot about the ways in which we did harm to everyone around us. Also, probably a lot of bad things happened to us that got washed away in a boozy haze.
Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school, which has no impact on our being seen as "meathead rich" whatsoever. Money wasn't as much of a factor as I realized, as most of the bias was outside my control. My house was probably 40% minorities, which is a statistic I'd like to use to show how little I understand about racial inequality. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half.
It's really easy to get comfortable with being a fundamentally bad person. Just invert the emotional response: fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that instead of ashamed. See how easy that was? Also you can point to how other people do it too. Tech companies are elitist, for example. We were shining examples of virtue defined precisely in the way that most benefited us.
Second, power structures in the business world closely resembles that of our frat world. Despite this being a serious problem in society, it benefits me directly so I choose to see it as en example of why frats are good instead of why the business world has problems. Want to see how ridiculous the inequality is in the university world? I'll brag about some stats. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
I like to think of a fraternity as a non-profit company run by students of our personal selection. It doesn't technically turn a profit, but we do! That's what nonprofits are all about, right? Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration for some reason I can't possibly fathom.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. Let me check my facebook. Actually it was thousands. I was very important. I knew important people. I really like important words like "president" and "executive".
Eventually I had to join the real world and it turned out that being part of an exclusive club full of people who were taught for years to value tribalism and self-importance pays off: I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
I stopped reading half way through because your shitpost twists everything said into a life of privilege and deceit. My dad was a mechanic. His dad worked in a steel mill. His dad worked in a steel mill. His dad escaped the horrors of WW1 in a country we'll never know.
Go ahead and twist everything I say until it either refutes me or supports whatever agenda you want.
You can talk general shit about fraternities but the minority part really bugs me. Our house was more Asian and African American than it was white. Are you saying my house bought minorities for points? Ballsy. We took them because they were good. My best friend was 100% black and going for his PhD.
Instead of lamely forming your argument by copy editing a few words of mine how about coming up with something of your own?
Wasn't trying to twist anything. Just letting you see how your post looks to someone not in your in-group.
It's crazy to me that your worldview is so deeply embedded with tribalism that you think your dad being a mechanic or your friend being black have anything to do with who you are.
The point about minorities is just that: by arguing that you're not racist because minorities are in your tribe, you're showing that you completely miss the point. For you, the in-group is your frat, your world. And being outside your world means lacking a variety of privileges in life.
But race is an in-group too, and maybe that's not one of the tribes you recognize, but for many people it is, and it's the tribalism that's the problem, not the fact that skin color happens to be a particularly easy and dangerous arbitrary criterion for admission into the tribe.
>It's crazy to me that your worldview is so deeply embedded with tribalism
And yours isn't? You just assumed this person is a "meathead rich retard" and a "fundamentally bad person" who "did harm to everyone around" because he's in a fraternity? Talk about unfair stereotyping.
>Wasn't trying to twist anything. Just letting you see how your post looks to someone not in your in-group.
You are trying to twist things. If you're going to be aggressively "anti-privelege" the least you could do is drop the smug moralizing and admit that you're pushing an agenda here based off of your own personal worldview.
Kevin Drum notes it's a weak result but if true, wonders if the authors draw the right conclusions:
suppose it’s true. Here’s what the authors say:
Our results indicate that college administrators face an important trade-off when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus: while such policies may significantly raise academic performance, these gains may come at a significant cost in terms of expected future income for their graduates.
I’d argue exactly the opposite: ... Allow me to reframe the authors’ conclusion:
Our results provide empirical evidence that fraternities are just another way for social elites to keep themselves at the top regardless of actual performance. Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that college administrators face few trade-offs when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus.
Just an anecdote, but joining a fraternity drastically improved my social skills...and I personally believe these skills are fundamental when it comes to being successful in the work force. Not because being in a fraternity made me a member of a elite alumni group that excludes others, but because it allows me to be a more effective team member.
I have not doubt that I would be far less successful if I was as socially self-isolating as I was in high school. Not just successful as far as career trajectory, but just a less effective contributor. Most jobs require team efforts...which require social skills to navigate politely and effectively.
It is from this perspective I find the original conclusion more reserved and purely based on observed correlations, while the second infers much (regarding causation).
I'm pretty sure most people develop social skills in university regardless of whether they join a fraternity. Having a group of adult friends, freedom, roommates, etc, all prepare you for the real world.
Fraternities also prepare you for the ugly parts of the real world, though. The real world is full of elite clubs without meritocratic entrance criteria, and learning how to join one and function within one is certainly an advantage.
I would argue that removing this advantage from as many people as possible would make the system of society as a whole run better, though.
> I'm pretty sure most people develop social skills in university regardless of whether they join a fraternity
Being in a frat isn’t the only way to develop these skills. But lots of people coast through college without any non-academic social extracurricular exposure.
Not to mention your brothers will often push you into situations out of your comfort zone. OF COURSE this means you sometimes get peer pressured into making mistakes, that's part of growing up. However, my social skills went through the roof by constantly being "forced" to socialize and my own self-confidence grew immensely. Net positive for sure
Or, maybe, there's a difference between getting a good grade in the class, inside strictly controlled academic environment shaped by the college administration, and the real world where one has to deal with chaotic conditions of real life and social environments rarely covered by academic curriculum. And fraternity life improves social skills, and gives people tools that can make them successful outside of the strict conformance to the rules prescribed by the academy. And limiting access to those tools would only make future graduates less fit to meet the challenges of the open market.
>Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities.
This is not a correct statement based on the abstract of the paper.
The group of people that did not join fraternities does not consist entirely of "those rejected by fraternities", but those who are rejected and those who didn't bother applying in the first place.
You want to watch out for when trains of thought become unscientific.
This part is science: "After carefully controlling for all variables, we can conclude that the choice to join a fraternity has these quantifiable downstream impacts, on average."
This part is just-so stories: "That happens because . . . "
I know it's aggravating, but to insist on a high degree of caution in demonstrating a truth and then to insist on none when it comes to interpreting it lends reckless thinking an undeserved veneer of respectability.
1. Frats select for lower overall academic ability. Few physics, biochem, ee majors. This bleeds over into their easier major.
2. Frats select for larger physical stature and attractiveness. This deselects for academic performance and strongly selects for business success.
3. Most importantly, there is little artistic, creative, or purely intellectual emphasis here. If a young person is dedicated to "going for the money" at an early age, the results are not surprising.
These advantages, while enduring, are likely to reduce with time, in my opinion.
> Frats select for larger physical stature and attractiveness. This deselects for academic performance and strongly selects for business success
Physical stature and attractiveness are negatively correlated with academic performance? Sounds like you're repeating a stereotype. Can you cite evidence of that? (I have come across studies, e.g., Kanazawa 2011, that show significant positive correlation between intelligence and attractiveness. Also, frats are not composed of purely attractive people. That's just Hollywood movie nonsense. I've met plenty of unattractive and rather dull frat members.)
So... spending time networking and developing your most important job skill, that of interpersonal communication, pays dividends later in life at the expense of a small hit in your GPA?
Indeed, the power of networking. I was not in a frat but I can attest that my GPA didn't help me get a job, my college roommates did! ...and they probably lowered my GPA too!
Networking is the true value of going to "good" schools too.
You're going to read the same books and have the same general coursework at an ivy league as you will a state school. The difference is the people, including who is teaching you, who is learning along with you, and who they know.
It's kind of junk, because it doesn't include and control for variables like pre-collegiate socioeconomic status which is well-known to contribute to both likelihood of joining a fraternity and income potential.
As a result, while it shows a correlation, it provides very little basis to reject that the correlation is due to a common cause rather than frat membership causing the income result.
A fraternity is like a business. Learning to work within that kind of structure can help prepare you for the real world in a way that .25 of of a GPA cannot. But it's likely more correlation than causation. I'm not convinced by the methodology the authors claim distill causal effects. The Minerva and Theme variables are assumed to present plausible alternatives to Greek life but that may not be the case.
A few bad fraternities/fraternity brothers give the institution as a whole a bad reputation, but aside from those bad ones I don't understand the fraternity hate. What's wrong with wanting to be part of socially beneficial organization that will help you make friends and party over the course of (some of) the most carefree years of your life?
From the paper: "Since our results are drawn from data on a single college, they may have limited external validity." In particular, they specified that this college is a small liberal arts school. I too was in a fraternity at a small liberal arts school. I think people should be wary when trying to paint the national fraternity system with the same brush stroke, as the greek climate at small liberal schools can be quite different that the climate at large universities. I'm not sure how this would affect their results, but the environment is very different in my mind.
They also say: "57% of alumni in our sample report belonging to a fraternity, which is somewhat higher than the 46% of all male alumni that were fraternity members. Greek alumni may be over-represented in the survey due to greater attachment to the college." While they mention this detail in passing, I find it quite interesting. Not sure what the implications are; it would probably require further study.
I'm also not quite sure I buy that people self reporting the amount they drink is controlled by adding their age and age squared as factors. I think it's natural to remember the "good times", which often coincide with drinking, but not remember the weeks you spent slogging through coursework. This, sometimes combined with a perverse incentive structure that says drinking is cool and you should do it more, may artificially inflate the self reported number of nights in a week spent drinking.
I also see a lot of people in this comment thread saying the increased salary is intuitive due to the connections made in a fraternity. I am suspicious of this. This is anecdata, but I was one of two computer science majors in my fraternity (of ~75 members). I have received no obvious professional gain from being in my fraternity. A number of my other friends who went to med school, dental school, and law school had to get in on their own merits -- fraternity connections do not apply to those domains (alumni ones, perhaps, but not fraternity). Others who got jobs seemed to rely more on connections between our college and various companies, not through our fraternity.
It's unfortunate that this paper does not control for college major -- they do when considering the grade regressions, but not the future salary. I would imagine the distribution of majors for people who are in a fraternity are different than the distribution of majors for those who are not. Perhaps those majors chosen by people in a fraternity, like law or business, tend to be more lucrative. Additionally, I can imagine people in some of the more socially conscious majors might be repulsed at the idea of joining a fraternity, and also do not tend to be the highest paying. I am being a bit broad and hand-wavey, but this comment is not a research paper -- just trying to capture my intuition.
Lastly, relying on my personal experience, I think a fraternity might improve qualities necessary for working at a company. Again, anecdata warning, but I became more sociable and confident after joining my fraternity; I also became less edgy, awkward, and bashful. I think these qualities are some of the intangibles that can help people get ahead at a company. Perhaps most importantly, you are forced to live and work with some people who you dislike, which is essential for being in the workforce.
All in all, I think it's an interesting paper, and I appreciate their work. It still leaves something to be desired though.
I would have failed out of college if it wasn't for people in my fraternity pushing me to get my grade straightened out. Joining one was one of the best decisions I ever made. I was shy and really wasn't very good at socializing before I joined.
For people saying all the fraternity members being from well to do families, I disagree. It was about the same price as staying in the dorms. We had a professional cook, on site laundry, live in advisor (house mom), and a large yard. I think I paid $600/month for all food, board and utilities.
One positive thing about being in a fraternity -- it provides experience in dealing with and resolving conflict in a large organization.
For better or worse, navigating the internal politics of a clique such as a college fraternity is often similar to what many people later experience in the wilds of the corporate world.
You also get a lot of practice meeting & building rapport with a wide variety of peers (both male and female), if your fraternity socializes frequently.
These 'soft' social skills are just as much of a factor in determining salary as technical ones. And for all their warts and downsides, fraternities do provide you with good practice. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to pay the dues, etc...
However -- more time socializing means less time for studying. So GPA goes down, but interpersonal skills go up. These new interpersonal skills pay off dividends later, though.
Rather than attack the study and criticize the limited data (one northeastern US university) and the conclusions it draws, I'll say I'm intrigued by the results and would hope for a larger study that brings in a larger data set and controls for school type and geography.
I find it interesting how strongly HN as a collective believes corporate America isn't a meritocracy in some threads, while in others it assumes hiring decisions are all about merit.
The difference mostly seems to revolve around whether sexism is brought up.
Here we are discussing men joining men-only organisations for networking purposes and the general consensus is basically "duh, that's how I got my job. Everyone knows that's how it works!"
> I find it interesting how strongly HN as a collective believes corporate America isn't a meritocracy in some threads, while in others it assumes hiring decisions are all about merit.
It's because HN isn't a collective in the sense that we all share the same opinions (as much as one might reference the hive mind). There's a wide range of opinions, values, and experiences and you'll notice some piping up in one area and others in, uh, others. Add the wrinkle that we're all (well, likely mostly) human with all of the idiosyncrasies of human psychology that implies. We're perfectly capable of hypocri^H^H^H^H^H logical inconsistency. There's a lot of evidence that our rationality is there primarily to rationalize (in the truest sense) our intuitions and explain them to others.
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[ 5.5 ms ] story [ 190 ms ] threadI think GPA alone is just a very poor predictor of success. There are a ton of other, much more important factors.
EDIT: "didn't help" might actually be "helped immensely", ha
"Elite" careers care a lot about GPA.
I, for one, have never put my GPA on my resume.
When a buddy of mine was interviewing at hedge funds, a few of them didn't just want his undergrad GPA, but also his high school SAT scores. He actually got shit from one of the interviewers because his French SAT scores were shady... the dude had a few years of finance experience and a PhD in theoretical physics. YMMV.
If you have great talent and seek a great career, then a high GPA will make it substantially easier to get (and to pass) interviews at top-tier employers, and to get into the most competitive areas within those firms. This will, in-turn, have positive knock-on effects for your future career.
It is possible to succeed greatly with any GPA. It is much simpler with a good GPA.
Why claim causal link here?
Before getting too up in arms it's probably worthwhile to see what the actual paper claims.
"Researcher L. David Mech, one of the primary creators of the Alpha male hypothesis for wolves, later found additional evidence that the concept of an Alpha male may have been an erroneous interpretation of incomplete data and formally disavowed this terminology in 1999. He explained that it was heavily based on the behavior of captive packs consisting of unrelated individuals, an error reflecting the once prevailing view that wild pack formation occurred in winter among independent gray wolves. Later research on wild gray wolves revealed that the pack is usually a family consisting of a breeding pair and its offspring of the previous 1–3 years.[16]
Researcher M.W. Foster investigated primates and found that the leaders were more likely to be those who did more for those around them instead of being determined by strength. [17]
In humans, the concept of an alpha male was challenged as being largely nonexist as per an article by Dean Burnett, who found that human leadership roles vary wildly based on the current social context, and traits attributed to an "Alpha" might be exhibited in one scenario, and traits attributed to a "Beta" might be exhibited in a different scenario by the same individual. [18]"
Wolf behavior is mostly irrelevant in that context.
By looking at those students, you attempt to control for "interest in joining a frat" as a variable, and look at the outcomes for people with equivalent interest who either did or did not join a frat.
> In this paper, we identify the causal effect of fraternity membership on college grades and future income levels by exploiting time variation in the college’s social and residential environment. We use the presence of theme houses and non-Greek social houses and the presence of female students on campus, all of which may affect students’ choices bout whether to join a Greek organization, as instruments or reek membership.These changes allow us to identify shifts in he probability of fraternity membership that are plausibly exogenous and, thereby, to estimate the impact of fraternity membership on an individual’s academic and economic performance. We include controls for student human and social capital endowments to alleviate concerns that the policy changes that generate our instruments may have altered the composition of the student body. An additional advantage of using these instruments is that they are clearly choice variables from the perspective of the college administration.
very few people played a college-level sport and were in frats, for example.
I learned how to read a room, operate a night club, talk to (and avoid) police, be drunk without causing a scene, run meetings, talk to people to get stuff done, manage projects, and act normally in awkward situations.
I come from humble means - my parents couldnt and didnt pay for any of the (expensive) school I ended up attending. I ended up joining one of only two "wet" fraternities on campus (meaning we were allowed to have booze in our house), and the one considered the most social. I was (am) an introvert and didn't drink in high school or college until I was 21. I loved nearly every moment. Not once did wealth, influence or ability to pay impact our recruitment decisions (and I was deeply involved in the process all three years). In fact, we did more due diligence on "legacies" than any other candidate.
My fraternity brothers were some of the most dynamic and interesting people I've had the honor of knowing. It was the first chance I ever had to delve into real politics...as a member of the executive board, we dealt with some challenging interpersonal issues that I wouldnt have been able to wrestle with until much later in my life.
While my brothers were very different than me, I grew more and learned more while living in my house than I did in the rest of college.
Stereotypes exist for a reason. But there are also virtuous, powerful reasons why fraternities endure.
Would that be a better situation? I don't know but I personally doubt you would not have had the same meaningful growth if you lived in a hypothetical world where the social Greek system did not exist.
No, these positives aren't unique to Greek life, and yes, there are shenanigans too, sometimes worse. Sorry to hear about your negative experience. I hope it was only a vocal minority who were acting so terribly.
To the suggestion in the title of this post, there's more to a product than the technology, and I say that as a technical person. Education is important, but most of it takes place outside the classroom. None of us does it alone.
Yet, I don't imagine you would want to trade places with any of the guys you blackballed from your friendly club. Having been a navy fighter pilot, are you really going to try to tell me, with a straight face, about how hard it was to pay for school or fit in?
I was fortunate to have an ROTC scholarship (open to most Americans who qualify) which paid for tuition, but I paid it back in spades with the 10 years I subsequently gave in service. Perhaps that's unwarranted privilege - only you can interpret that.
No, I'm happy for you and glad you had the opportunity. It's just you started your anecdote about humble beginnings, and yet you had a full ride in college. You might not see yourself as a rich kid, but leaving college without crushing debt is something only a privileged few can do these days.
https://secure.marketwatch.com/story/class-of-2015-has-the-m...
It sounds like, similar to many popular people I've known, you have impostor syndrome. Despite all evidence to the contrary, you swear up and down that you're a square peg and an outsider. And you really believe it. You're not doing it for sympathy. I can clearly detect that from you.
Good research controls for stuff like that.
Please start something (company or otherwise) that will make it easy for adults (young and old) to become part of a large, real world social network. One which will help them form good career connections, as well as platonic and romantic relationships. Fraternities create their own unique culture (traditions, handshakes, songs, idioms, etc) to tie people together, so keep that in mind. Please leave hazing out of it too.
Kindly,
Baron
Silicon Valley already does have its version of frats: companies. Alumni networks are the equivalent of a frat; working at Google or Facebook or another big company all have their own culture and opens up a lot of doors when you're job hunting.
At the end of the day, though, it's not a problem tech can solve. It's a people problem.
Ew, no. Work-life balance?
Now, of course, the fraternities can't say that that's why they're exclusive, but yeah, they're exclusive for a reason.
A fraternity (and the associated wider friends-of-friends social network) that consists of dozens or even hundreds of people doing favors to each other over the non-frat people, that's still manageable and self-sustainable. However, the world has billions of people. A network of million already is useless, and would leave the market open for another exclusive social club.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15316723
I think Vive Church [1] offers exactly what you're looking for!
[1] https://vivechurch.org/
-David
Churches are real-world social networks that are generally easy to join (the degree to which they provide large or strong networls vary considerably, of course.)
There are lots of other examples.
I'm not sure what the opportunity for Silicon Valley is here.
It's actually a thing that I'm a part of!
Check out Vive Church [1], formerly known as C3 Silicon Valley [2]
[1] https://vivechurch.org/
[2] https://www.buzzfeed.com/nitashatiku/c3-silicon-valley-churc...
-David
While I don’t want to go into details, the basic idea is to use technology to track and bank reciprocation as well as the problem of in-group identification. I thought it was clever, but it just got added to my ever expanding good idea list :)
I'm only somewhat kidding.
http://linkedin.com
Now that I'm done being flippant, there are other things like IVY which purport to be exclusive networks that give you access to events and networks that will help your career and social stature, but at their core any and all of these things will be businesses that will extract as much money as they can from all parts of their client base. Contrast that to a fraternity, which seems much less like a business, at least in the sense that the proprietors are separated from the consumers of the product.
All I'm saying is that SV's motivations in creating something like this may necessarily not provide folks with the same authentic experience that a fraternity would.
You filter yourself to high value people because they're more likely to be able to afford 10%. You have a sacrifice these people are making, and a reason to help others. If you help some random guy land a job where he's making good money it further your goal of increasing donations to charity.
(One major issue from the SV side, I think, is that the business models don’t align with the goals. A startup aiming to tackle this problem would probably need to be organized as a cooperative. See “Jungletown” for an example of what happens when community thinking butts up against top-down, profit-driven leadership.)
[1]: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/xygykj/my-year-in... [2]: https://www.viceland.com/en_us/show/jungletown
When frat guys with names like "Baron" claim they have superior social awareness, this is what they mean.
What no one told me in Uni is that:
+ You're either tech or not tech, and not tech is not sexy in the valley
+ You need experience, no one cares about all the extra coursework you do, experience is king
+ Don't wear a suit to an interview in the valley, ever.
+ Your connections are invaluable, form lasting relationships, it's one of those weird things where not studying pays off, a lower GPA is actually good in this instance, and the bonding time with the bros is more valuable down the line.
I'm not disagreeing, I just want to know more.
First, there's selection bias. We would only take guys that were really sociable, somewhat hard working, competitive, and with decent grades. Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is a myth. We would pick the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school. Money wasn't a factor. Neither was skin color, my house was probably 40% minorities. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half. Fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that. So are all the tech companies.... We only took the best. Yeah we drank more than most students and had crazy parties but we were also smart, hardworking, and had a lot of friends.
Second, the power structure closely resembles the business world, complete with budgets of over a half million even in a modest sized house. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
A fraternity is basically a non-profit company run by students. Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. I was vice president for several years and I knew hundreds. Maybe 20 really well. I knew people on the school board. I met the president of the University enough times that he knew me by name. The president of the student senate was a great friend that lived across the hall.
I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
First, there's confirmation bias. Our social group's identity was build around feeling superior, so we chose to value the things we were good at, and forgot about the ways in which we did harm to everyone around us. Also, probably a lot of bad things happened to us that got washed away in a boozy haze.
Most fraternities were the same. "Frat bros" being meathead rich retards is not how we see ourselves. We see ourselves as the smartest, most promising, and sociable guys in the school, which has no impact on our being seen as "meathead rich" whatsoever. Money wasn't as much of a factor as I realized, as most of the bias was outside my control. My house was probably 40% minorities, which is a statistic I'd like to use to show how little I understand about racial inequality. But we had a fraternity GPA a solid .6 above school mens average and a dropout rate of less than half.
It's really easy to get comfortable with being a fundamentally bad person. Just invert the emotional response: fraternities ARE elitist and I was proud of that instead of ashamed. See how easy that was? Also you can point to how other people do it too. Tech companies are elitist, for example. We were shining examples of virtue defined precisely in the way that most benefited us.
Second, power structures in the business world closely resembles that of our frat world. Despite this being a serious problem in society, it benefits me directly so I choose to see it as en example of why frats are good instead of why the business world has problems. Want to see how ridiculous the inequality is in the university world? I'll brag about some stats. Bigger houses have budgets of millions a year. These budgets were handled by the "exec board" which was just democratically elected student members.
I like to think of a fraternity as a non-profit company run by students of our personal selection. It doesn't technically turn a profit, but we do! That's what nonprofits are all about, right? Harder to do than it sounds, especially with all the hate towards Greek coming from the school itself. At many schools the Greek system is actively shunned by the administration for some reason I can't possibly fathom.
Then there's the connections. Being in a fraternity/sorority means you automatically know over 50 people pretty well, sometimes hundreds. Let me check my facebook. Actually it was thousands. I was very important. I knew important people. I really like important words like "president" and "executive".
Eventually I had to join the real world and it turned out that being part of an exclusive club full of people who were taught for years to value tribalism and self-importance pays off: I got my first job from an old friend from the house and another was kind enough to help me move across the country to a tech hotspot. We're all still friends to this day and we joke about how wedding are largely a fraternity reunion. Everything in my life today exists largely because I joined a fraternity 8 years ago.
FTFY
Go ahead and twist everything I say until it either refutes me or supports whatever agenda you want.
You can talk general shit about fraternities but the minority part really bugs me. Our house was more Asian and African American than it was white. Are you saying my house bought minorities for points? Ballsy. We took them because they were good. My best friend was 100% black and going for his PhD.
Instead of lamely forming your argument by copy editing a few words of mine how about coming up with something of your own?
It's crazy to me that your worldview is so deeply embedded with tribalism that you think your dad being a mechanic or your friend being black have anything to do with who you are.
The point about minorities is just that: by arguing that you're not racist because minorities are in your tribe, you're showing that you completely miss the point. For you, the in-group is your frat, your world. And being outside your world means lacking a variety of privileges in life.
But race is an in-group too, and maybe that's not one of the tribes you recognize, but for many people it is, and it's the tribalism that's the problem, not the fact that skin color happens to be a particularly easy and dangerous arbitrary criterion for admission into the tribe.
>It's crazy to me that your worldview is so deeply embedded with tribalism
And yours isn't? You just assumed this person is a "meathead rich retard" and a "fundamentally bad person" who "did harm to everyone around" because he's in a fraternity? Talk about unfair stereotyping.
>Wasn't trying to twist anything. Just letting you see how your post looks to someone not in your in-group.
You are trying to twist things. If you're going to be aggressively "anti-privelege" the least you could do is drop the smug moralizing and admit that you're pushing an agenda here based off of your own personal worldview.
suppose it’s true. Here’s what the authors say:
Our results indicate that college administrators face an important trade-off when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus: while such policies may significantly raise academic performance, these gains may come at a significant cost in terms of expected future income for their graduates.
I’d argue exactly the opposite: ... Allow me to reframe the authors’ conclusion:
Our results provide empirical evidence that fraternities are just another way for social elites to keep themselves at the top regardless of actual performance. Those rejected by fraternities, even though they have higher GPAs, earn 36 percent less than those accepted by fraternities. This is further evidence, if any were needed, that college administrators face few trade-offs when they consider policies designed to limit fraternity life on campus.
http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2017/09/new-report-fra...
I have not doubt that I would be far less successful if I was as socially self-isolating as I was in high school. Not just successful as far as career trajectory, but just a less effective contributor. Most jobs require team efforts...which require social skills to navigate politely and effectively.
It is from this perspective I find the original conclusion more reserved and purely based on observed correlations, while the second infers much (regarding causation).
Fraternities also prepare you for the ugly parts of the real world, though. The real world is full of elite clubs without meritocratic entrance criteria, and learning how to join one and function within one is certainly an advantage.
I would argue that removing this advantage from as many people as possible would make the system of society as a whole run better, though.
Being in a frat isn’t the only way to develop these skills. But lots of people coast through college without any non-academic social extracurricular exposure.
Nice stereotype.
This is not a correct statement based on the abstract of the paper.
The group of people that did not join fraternities does not consist entirely of "those rejected by fraternities", but those who are rejected and those who didn't bother applying in the first place.
This part is science: "After carefully controlling for all variables, we can conclude that the choice to join a fraternity has these quantifiable downstream impacts, on average."
This part is just-so stories: "That happens because . . . "
I know it's aggravating, but to insist on a high degree of caution in demonstrating a truth and then to insist on none when it comes to interpreting it lends reckless thinking an undeserved veneer of respectability.
These advantages, while enduring, are likely to reduce with time, in my opinion.
Physical stature and attractiveness are negatively correlated with academic performance? Sounds like you're repeating a stereotype. Can you cite evidence of that? (I have come across studies, e.g., Kanazawa 2011, that show significant positive correlation between intelligence and attractiveness. Also, frats are not composed of purely attractive people. That's just Hollywood movie nonsense. I've met plenty of unattractive and rather dull frat members.)
Color me not at all surprised.
You're going to read the same books and have the same general coursework at an ivy league as you will a state school. The difference is the people, including who is teaching you, who is learning along with you, and who they know.
As a result, while it shows a correlation, it provides very little basis to reject that the correlation is due to a common cause rather than frat membership causing the income result.
A few bad fraternities/fraternity brothers give the institution as a whole a bad reputation, but aside from those bad ones I don't understand the fraternity hate. What's wrong with wanting to be part of socially beneficial organization that will help you make friends and party over the course of (some of) the most carefree years of your life?
They also say: "57% of alumni in our sample report belonging to a fraternity, which is somewhat higher than the 46% of all male alumni that were fraternity members. Greek alumni may be over-represented in the survey due to greater attachment to the college." While they mention this detail in passing, I find it quite interesting. Not sure what the implications are; it would probably require further study.
I'm also not quite sure I buy that people self reporting the amount they drink is controlled by adding their age and age squared as factors. I think it's natural to remember the "good times", which often coincide with drinking, but not remember the weeks you spent slogging through coursework. This, sometimes combined with a perverse incentive structure that says drinking is cool and you should do it more, may artificially inflate the self reported number of nights in a week spent drinking.
I also see a lot of people in this comment thread saying the increased salary is intuitive due to the connections made in a fraternity. I am suspicious of this. This is anecdata, but I was one of two computer science majors in my fraternity (of ~75 members). I have received no obvious professional gain from being in my fraternity. A number of my other friends who went to med school, dental school, and law school had to get in on their own merits -- fraternity connections do not apply to those domains (alumni ones, perhaps, but not fraternity). Others who got jobs seemed to rely more on connections between our college and various companies, not through our fraternity.
It's unfortunate that this paper does not control for college major -- they do when considering the grade regressions, but not the future salary. I would imagine the distribution of majors for people who are in a fraternity are different than the distribution of majors for those who are not. Perhaps those majors chosen by people in a fraternity, like law or business, tend to be more lucrative. Additionally, I can imagine people in some of the more socially conscious majors might be repulsed at the idea of joining a fraternity, and also do not tend to be the highest paying. I am being a bit broad and hand-wavey, but this comment is not a research paper -- just trying to capture my intuition.
Lastly, relying on my personal experience, I think a fraternity might improve qualities necessary for working at a company. Again, anecdata warning, but I became more sociable and confident after joining my fraternity; I also became less edgy, awkward, and bashful. I think these qualities are some of the intangibles that can help people get ahead at a company. Perhaps most importantly, you are forced to live and work with some people who you dislike, which is essential for being in the workforce.
All in all, I think it's an interesting paper, and I appreciate their work. It still leaves something to be desired though.
For people saying all the fraternity members being from well to do families, I disagree. It was about the same price as staying in the dorms. We had a professional cook, on site laundry, live in advisor (house mom), and a large yard. I think I paid $600/month for all food, board and utilities.
For better or worse, navigating the internal politics of a clique such as a college fraternity is often similar to what many people later experience in the wilds of the corporate world.
You also get a lot of practice meeting & building rapport with a wide variety of peers (both male and female), if your fraternity socializes frequently.
These 'soft' social skills are just as much of a factor in determining salary as technical ones. And for all their warts and downsides, fraternities do provide you with good practice. Of course, you need to be wealthy enough to pay the dues, etc...
However -- more time socializing means less time for studying. So GPA goes down, but interpersonal skills go up. These new interpersonal skills pay off dividends later, though.
Just an extremely non-rigorous hypothesis.
The difference mostly seems to revolve around whether sexism is brought up.
Here we are discussing men joining men-only organisations for networking purposes and the general consensus is basically "duh, that's how I got my job. Everyone knows that's how it works!"
It's because HN isn't a collective in the sense that we all share the same opinions (as much as one might reference the hive mind). There's a wide range of opinions, values, and experiences and you'll notice some piping up in one area and others in, uh, others. Add the wrinkle that we're all (well, likely mostly) human with all of the idiosyncrasies of human psychology that implies. We're perfectly capable of hypocri^H^H^H^H^H logical inconsistency. There's a lot of evidence that our rationality is there primarily to rationalize (in the truest sense) our intuitions and explain them to others.