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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

Are there consultants who help deprogram young men & women to stop them wanting to join sororities and fraternities?

Sororities and fraternities are one thing. But young men and women and their families in the USA want to join elite fraternities and sororities because this can give a person a huge advantage in post-university employment, and possibly allow you to extract financial benefits for decades afterward. And this is true of student societies historically and in many other countries today.

really? As an (somewhat embarrassed) Ivy league fraternity member, I never saw one example of this actually being true. Networking sure, but greek life is just one, and not even particularly potent form, of job networking.

It's possible I was blind to it since I didn't go through corporate recruiting and stayed academic, but it truly didn't seem like anyone's motivation when I was in college.

Are these a purely US thing? They don't seem to exist in UK universities

I wonder if lack of a fraternity and sorority scene in the UK, is due to the fact networking among the children of the elites in the UK starts even earlier in life, at public schools. Historically, by the time you went up to a university, you were already well set on an elite path.

The UK is a state sponsor of royalty.

There's no room to build one in the private sector.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullingdon_Club

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_University_of_Oxford_d...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cambridge_Apostles

No reason to hate sororities and frats because we nerds couldn't join or didn't want to join.

Still… you have to admit that it’s a pretty weird and distinctly American concept where you essentially pay to have friends.

You are joining a cult which doubles as a long term support group. Since race and shared experience are no longer unifying social pillars, frats and sororities fill the void. Initiates pledge allegiance and loyalty to the cult and its goals and these commitments are verified through psychological tests.

Sounds terrible and inferior to genuine relationships.

Especially since the psychological tests often involve physical torture. It becomes the shared experience that initiates bond over.

Paying to have friends sounds a lot like "college" in general to this nerd.

I was always told "wait until you get to college and you'll find those people." Plus there's the common narrative of college friends you'll have for the rest of your life.

Yeah it wasn’t my experience either to be fair, I don’t talk to a single person from that time any longer. I found some of those experiences elsewhere in life though and I hope you did too!

> no reason

Umm... There's probably some good reasons.

https://www.vox.com/22384053/abolish-greek-life-fraternities...

Vox link, I already imagined the reasons they were going to give.

Imagination is all you need, I guess.

Not really, which is why I clicked to confirm.

When you have someone saying that everybody has a certain problem, the problem is usually them.

A general observation would be that in-group and out-group behaviour in teens and early stage adults is normal, but normalising the formalism of being in or out is a regressive tendency.

you may like it. Lots of people don't and it's their business because its about all of us in the end.

That said, Geraldo opening skull and bones vaults Doonesbury is a great cartoon sequence.

A better model might be "erasmus" -a European norm, which has led to strong bonds, without the hazing and drinking rituals.

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