7 ms·

The Fraternity Paradox: Lower GPA, Higher Incomes

52 points by rayuela 9y ago

Kevin_S 9y ago
There are so many reasons for this. Self-selection of confident, motivated men is a part of it. Membership/leadership in a fraternity is all about social contracts. You come to college with 0 or maybe a few strong social contracts, and students fail/drop out due to lack of support all the time. Fraternities provide 30-60 strong social contracts freshman can rely on. Fraternities also (by way of current major makeup) select for certain majors. I was a highly involved business major, and recruited many other business majors into our chapter. We had 1 art major member. The mission is to make you a better person. Most buy into that and do it. This leads to higher income.
- nw291 9y ago
  Motivated to do what? Make other people work for them and be creative for them while taking the credit. I have literally never seen any bright idea or accomplished work from a leadership person. Never.
- jermaustin1 9y ago
  I feel the most important aspect of fraternities is than that you gain a network of peers you can call upon in the future to advance your career.
  - watty 9y ago
    Were you in a fraternity? I'm not saying you're wrong but I can't think of a single fraternity member who has their job due to some other fraternity member. Maybe we were a weak fraternity but my opinion is that the higher earnings is due mainly to being above average socially.
  - tj-teej 9y ago
    A lot of people who were not in Fraternities "feel" this way.
- sudosteph 9y ago
  If that's really the case, I would expect that sororities would have a similar outcome. Every sorority member I know (it's not many though tbh) would say the same things about it making them a better person and providing strong social contacts to rely on. But the article says sorority members had no income benefit. There must be another factor at play. The author did say the lower age of sororities could be a factor b/c networks are less established, but surely that would mean there is no corresponding benefit for men in new fraternities, which I doubt is the case. Either way, they should do a comparison that accounts for age of org and study the effect at women's colleges next (especially women's colleges that turn co-ed, since that would be equivalent to their subject here).
bllguo 9y ago
My impression is that GPA isn't really that important beyond your first job, unless you're trying to get in grad school. And like the article says, in many cases it's who you know, not what you learn. Baffling that this is still surprising enough to be labeled a "paradox" and to be the subject of articles.
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  It would have been surprising to me when I was in college, or even for a decade or two afterward. I didn't understand how valuable contacts were.
- smelendez 9y ago
  And GPA isn't necessarily a direct reflection of knowledge or skill level, especially outside of STEM classes. Think of a history class, where a big part of your grade might be a research paper only tangentially tied to the core of the course. Putting a bit less effort into it--the average GPA gap seems like the difference between an A and a B+ at many schools--doesn't necessarily mean you're less informed about that area of history. And knowing how much effort is worthwhile to put into a task given deadlines, other pressures, etc. is an extremely valuable skill in business and life in general.
- libria 9y ago
  I thought it was virtually common knowledge that higher GPA was generally correlated with higher income. Is there a recent study that shows the reverse?
  - bllguo 9y ago
    Sure, in general, but the key factor here is "fraternity." Of course people who have low GPAs, and are also not doing anything else like joining a frat or making social connections, will have lower incomes in the aggregate. They're spending their time doing things that won't help them get higher incomes (though they may still be worthwhile endeavors - not necessarily a waste of time; income isn't everything). This is how I see it. Once you reach a certain GPA threshold, making social connections is a more valuable use of your time than trying for higher grades. Unless you are one of the few people for whom GPA actually matters.
jwcacces 9y ago
The paradox is that some people still believe that higher GPAs produce higher incomes...
drblast 9y ago
Paradox? How is this even the least bit surprising to anyone? Does anyone seriously advocate getting a high GPA in the US anymore so that you can out-earn your peers? Does anyone seriously think that the leaders of companies are the studious academic experts in their field of choice? This is a paradox if you still pretend we live in a hierarchical meritocracy. To a certain point and income level we do; bad grades and no social connections won't help you. But if you can choose entering a class of rich and powerful people or getting a higher GPA, and your goal is financial reward? Come on now.
- eighthnate 9y ago
  > How is this even the least bit surprising to anyone? We are told or taught that the US is a land of opportunity and meritocracy. One of our great myths is that bloodline doesn't matter. It goes back to our founders and the fact that we fought against a bloodline royalty. This is what I was taught from kindergarten onwards. That america was special and exceptional. We didn't have royalty. Doesn't matter who your father was, we are all "kings" and equal. But you leave school and join the real world and you realize all of that was nonsense. Your success in life has more to do with who your parents are than anything else. George Bush with a C average is far better off than the valedictorian. Ultimately, we aren't as special or different than any other nation. I think this fact is surprising to most americans because we are taught something entirely different from the first day of school.
- csdrane 9y ago
  "The people that get Bs work for the people that get Cs, and the people that get As teach."
  - 52-6F-62 9y ago
    Where is this from?
    - csdrane 9y ago
      Not sure. I think I heard it from a teacher in high school.
pascalxus 9y ago
I think it all comes down to EQ. People who go into fraternities, on average tend to be more social, and have higher EQ. EQ is the ability to create desired social and professional outcomes: they know what to say, how to say it and who to say it too. It's not easily learned. High EQ leads to higher performance appraisals and better performance in interviews. Interviews tend to be extremely subjective in nature, dependent mostly on your ability to say what an interviewer wants to hear.
kolbe 9y ago
I read though the article and the comments, and no one seems to think it's due to fraternities essentially being gangs. They act collectively to help everyone within the faction succeed while other people tend to be part of much smaller and less cohesive networks. Much like humans beating out neanderthals who were individually more intelligent and stronger, but couldn't organize as well, frats bind allegiances in ways that casual friends rarely will go to the same lengths for.
- wutbrodo 9y ago
  > no one seems to think it's due to fraternities essentially being gangs. Probably because the word "fraternity" already captures all of the features that overlap with gangs without bringing in a whole load of irrelevant connotations?
  - kolbe 9y ago
    Fraternities seem to want to be so secretive about what they do and how they operate that it's helpful to use a different term that's more widely understood. As for 'irrelevant connotations', I know you are saying that because of the implied violent and illegal behavior that takes place in a gang, but from the outside, it doesn't exactly appear that frats are immune to that either. It's actually quite amazing how cohesive the organizations can be once a woman accuses one of their members of sexual assault.
- leggomylibro 9y ago
  Well, that's how a lot of colleges in the US and UK have historically worked. In the UK it was more explicit; if you were an aristocratic sort, you would send your children to a private boarding school where they would meet and befriend the children of your Peers of the Realm, and since Britain was a global empire back in those days, often the children of a similar upper class of people overseas. Prestigious universities functioned as an extension of that into young adulthood. In the US today, it's less about class and more about money. It's not that your child grows up among the children of nobility, so much as the children of people who can and will spend 5 (or even sometimes 6!) figures a year on their kids' education and future. Things like 'legacy admissions' and a difficult-to-navigate application process keep prestigious institutions largely full of the well-off, and again, since these really are world-class educational institutions, that includes well-off individuals from around the world. I think that Greek organizations are just one common part of the system that persists more visibly after graduation, but it's really about getting to know broad network of as many powerful people as possible. That sort of dynamic in education really stymies social mobility in general, though. It's like opportunity hoarding.
jonmc12 9y ago
Reading the study (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720) I'm amazed it did not consider parental income. Not only does parental income correlate strongly to child income as adults, but also to college acceptance. Most importantly in this case, parental income is usually used to pay fraternity dues. Fraternities might give a strong sample set of students with poor parents being separated from students who have parents with moderate to high incomes. Not to mention the obvious cultural divisions that might keep a high percentage of low income students from being included in many fraternities.
- fred_is_fred 9y ago
  Are fraternity dues that onerous? At my school (which was now 15+ years ago) living in a fraternity was roughly cost equivalent (within 10-15%) to living in the dorms with a meal plan.
  - TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
    Well for people without rich parents, the cost dorms with a meal plan is pretty onerous, and much more expensive than renting an apartment a little farther away. Adding 10-15% to that would limit it to the rich, the people who don't consider the cost, or the people who see the risk as worth it.
creatrixcordis 9y ago
who cares, if you know your shit, you walk in the interview and make them feel stupid, make them feel like you have a monopoly on knowledge, like it oozes out of you and drips to the floor and if they don't lick it off they might miss something, lol, then they would be stupid to pass on you, then they will surely want you on their team. but you can only do that if you really learn or you can bs to a professional level there are many ways into the castle, some people walk in the front door, some take the back door, some sneak through the side gate and some ride on the shoulders of others..., some fuck the manager or blow the boss, or maybe play golf at the same golf club or are in the same motorcycle club, or fuck the same prostitute and catch each other at the door and have an understanding, or have the same drug dealer if you are sitting on the sideline keeping score, you might end up hungry while someone eats your bread. it doesn't matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice. but my moms favorite quote was machiavelli's maxim, the end always justifies the means i guess the question is, if you would be in their shoes? you would read this article and say, damn right! i still think in a lot of corporate environments, money is definitely being made on the side by the decision makers when it comes time to pick an outsourcing firm, or award a contract to a contracting company, you know, you jack me off and i will jack you off later kinda thing, gotta grease the wheels of the company politics once in a while or else you might get caught not working
- pavel_lishin 9y ago
  > if you walk in the interview and make them feel stupid ... then you won't get hired, because nobody wants to hire an asshole with such poor social skills that they can't talk to someone without talking down to them.
  - creatrixcordis 9y ago
    how is showing your mental prowess talking down to "them"?, that is what interviews are for, you probably don't want to work for anyone who can't stand in a room with someone smarter then them, remember everyone is different, you will only feel stupid for a little while or in a state of lacking something, but in some cultures this behavior would be taken as a direct insult, i agree with you there, but hopefully you don't live in those countries, where everything is personal and macho...
sudosteph 9y ago
The GPA vs Income thing is not really the interesting thing in this article. The REALLY interesting thing was that there was no corresponding benefit for women who joined sororities. The author kind of hand-waved over this with statements such as: > One reason for this may be that women are more likely to form social bonds with other women outside of these structures. Which honestly doesn't make a ton of sense. If they're saying that the bonds formed in sororities are less intense than those of fraternities b/c women socialize outside them, they really need something to back that claim up. The few women I know who did join sororities were very much dedicated to their "sisters" and it pretty much controlled their social life. If they're saying that men need same-sex friendships to get positive career effects, and that women are more likely to already get those with or without a sorority, that's also not logical. Especially if you consider they studied the impact of fraternities over a time that includes dates from when the college was men-only and claim the fraternity effect was consistent. If "same sex social bonds" was really the driving factor, then men from non-fraternities should have seen the same effect back when the school was single-sex, since all of them would have more (and nearly exclusively) same-sex friendships. Their other reasoning is: > sororities hadn’t been around for long enough to provide the same networking opportunities as the more established fraternities at the former men's college he and his co-authors studied. This one seems easy to falsify as well. Simply compare the salary outcomes from men in newer / less-established fraternities (I assume those pop up from time to time?) to those in older ones, and compare both of those to sororities with age of organization considered to see the difference. If age of fraternity is irrelevant, then it should be irrelevant to sororities as well. I'm of the opinion that fraternities are a good way to make connections with people who don't mind doing favors for other fraternity members, including hiring/promoting/vouching for them over non-members for jobs. Since women are less likely to be in positions of power where they can do "favors' like that in the first place, and because studies show that women are judged more harshly for promoting diversity (aka hiring other women - see: https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-for-promoting-diversity https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...) there is less opportunity or incentive to use those connections to give career favors to sorority sisters.
basseq 9y ago
The article (and study) makes a leap that doesn't appear to be supported in the data. Namely, that the social capital (“connections”) built in a fraternity are the reason for higher income. I would propose an alternate hypothesis: that men who seek out and/or have been a part of a fraternity are better at building unrelated social capital that does affect income. Or, put another way, that men who build a network of fraternity brothers are going to be better at building professional networks as well. While the former may bolster the latter, and while the two may not be mutually-exclusive sets, the career benefit comes from the latter.

52 points by rayuela 9y ago

There are so many reasons for this. Self-selection of confident, motivated men is a part of it. Membership/leadership in a fraternity is all about social contracts. You come to college with 0 or maybe a few strong social contracts, and students fail/drop out due to lack of support all the time. Fraternities provide 30-60 strong social contracts freshman can rely on. Fraternities also (by way of current major makeup) select for certain majors. I was a highly involved business major, and recruited many other business majors into our chapter. We had 1 art major member. The mission is to make you a better person. Most buy into that and do it. This leads to higher income.

nw291 9y ago
Motivated to do what? Make other people work for them and be creative for them while taking the credit. I have literally never seen any bright idea or accomplished work from a leadership person. Never.
jermaustin1 9y ago
I feel the most important aspect of fraternities is than that you gain a network of peers you can call upon in the future to advance your career.
- watty 9y ago
  Were you in a fraternity? I'm not saying you're wrong but I can't think of a single fraternity member who has their job due to some other fraternity member. Maybe we were a weak fraternity but my opinion is that the higher earnings is due mainly to being above average socially.
- tj-teej 9y ago
  A lot of people who were not in Fraternities "feel" this way.
sudosteph 9y ago
If that's really the case, I would expect that sororities would have a similar outcome. Every sorority member I know (it's not many though tbh) would say the same things about it making them a better person and providing strong social contacts to rely on. But the article says sorority members had no income benefit. There must be another factor at play. The author did say the lower age of sororities could be a factor b/c networks are less established, but surely that would mean there is no corresponding benefit for men in new fraternities, which I doubt is the case. Either way, they should do a comparison that accounts for age of org and study the effect at women's colleges next (especially women's colleges that turn co-ed, since that would be equivalent to their subject here).

bllguo 9y ago

My impression is that GPA isn't really that important beyond your first job, unless you're trying to get in grad school. And like the article says, in many cases it's who you know, not what you learn. Baffling that this is still surprising enough to be labeled a "paradox" and to be the subject of articles.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
It would have been surprising to me when I was in college, or even for a decade or two afterward. I didn't understand how valuable contacts were.
smelendez 9y ago
And GPA isn't necessarily a direct reflection of knowledge or skill level, especially outside of STEM classes. Think of a history class, where a big part of your grade might be a research paper only tangentially tied to the core of the course. Putting a bit less effort into it--the average GPA gap seems like the difference between an A and a B+ at many schools--doesn't necessarily mean you're less informed about that area of history. And knowing how much effort is worthwhile to put into a task given deadlines, other pressures, etc. is an extremely valuable skill in business and life in general.
libria 9y ago
I thought it was virtually common knowledge that higher GPA was generally correlated with higher income. Is there a recent study that shows the reverse?
- bllguo 9y ago
  Sure, in general, but the key factor here is "fraternity." Of course people who have low GPAs, and are also not doing anything else like joining a frat or making social connections, will have lower incomes in the aggregate. They're spending their time doing things that won't help them get higher incomes (though they may still be worthwhile endeavors - not necessarily a waste of time; income isn't everything). This is how I see it. Once you reach a certain GPA threshold, making social connections is a more valuable use of your time than trying for higher grades. Unless you are one of the few people for whom GPA actually matters.

jwcacces 9y ago

The paradox is that some people still believe that higher GPAs produce higher incomes...

drblast 9y ago

Paradox? How is this even the least bit surprising to anyone? Does anyone seriously advocate getting a high GPA in the US anymore so that you can out-earn your peers? Does anyone seriously think that the leaders of companies are the studious academic experts in their field of choice? This is a paradox if you still pretend we live in a hierarchical meritocracy. To a certain point and income level we do; bad grades and no social connections won't help you. But if you can choose entering a class of rich and powerful people or getting a higher GPA, and your goal is financial reward? Come on now.

eighthnate 9y ago
> How is this even the least bit surprising to anyone? We are told or taught that the US is a land of opportunity and meritocracy. One of our great myths is that bloodline doesn't matter. It goes back to our founders and the fact that we fought against a bloodline royalty. This is what I was taught from kindergarten onwards. That america was special and exceptional. We didn't have royalty. Doesn't matter who your father was, we are all "kings" and equal. But you leave school and join the real world and you realize all of that was nonsense. Your success in life has more to do with who your parents are than anything else. George Bush with a C average is far better off than the valedictorian. Ultimately, we aren't as special or different than any other nation. I think this fact is surprising to most americans because we are taught something entirely different from the first day of school.
csdrane 9y ago
"The people that get Bs work for the people that get Cs, and the people that get As teach."
- 52-6F-62 9y ago
  Where is this from?
  - csdrane 9y ago
    Not sure. I think I heard it from a teacher in high school.

pascalxus 9y ago

I think it all comes down to EQ. People who go into fraternities, on average tend to be more social, and have higher EQ. EQ is the ability to create desired social and professional outcomes: they know what to say, how to say it and who to say it too. It's not easily learned. High EQ leads to higher performance appraisals and better performance in interviews. Interviews tend to be extremely subjective in nature, dependent mostly on your ability to say what an interviewer wants to hear.

kolbe 9y ago

I read though the article and the comments, and no one seems to think it's due to fraternities essentially being gangs. They act collectively to help everyone within the faction succeed while other people tend to be part of much smaller and less cohesive networks. Much like humans beating out neanderthals who were individually more intelligent and stronger, but couldn't organize as well, frats bind allegiances in ways that casual friends rarely will go to the same lengths for.

wutbrodo 9y ago
> no one seems to think it's due to fraternities essentially being gangs. Probably because the word "fraternity" already captures all of the features that overlap with gangs without bringing in a whole load of irrelevant connotations?
- kolbe 9y ago
  Fraternities seem to want to be so secretive about what they do and how they operate that it's helpful to use a different term that's more widely understood. As for 'irrelevant connotations', I know you are saying that because of the implied violent and illegal behavior that takes place in a gang, but from the outside, it doesn't exactly appear that frats are immune to that either. It's actually quite amazing how cohesive the organizations can be once a woman accuses one of their members of sexual assault.
leggomylibro 9y ago
Well, that's how a lot of colleges in the US and UK have historically worked. In the UK it was more explicit; if you were an aristocratic sort, you would send your children to a private boarding school where they would meet and befriend the children of your Peers of the Realm, and since Britain was a global empire back in those days, often the children of a similar upper class of people overseas. Prestigious universities functioned as an extension of that into young adulthood. In the US today, it's less about class and more about money. It's not that your child grows up among the children of nobility, so much as the children of people who can and will spend 5 (or even sometimes 6!) figures a year on their kids' education and future. Things like 'legacy admissions' and a difficult-to-navigate application process keep prestigious institutions largely full of the well-off, and again, since these really are world-class educational institutions, that includes well-off individuals from around the world. I think that Greek organizations are just one common part of the system that persists more visibly after graduation, but it's really about getting to know broad network of as many powerful people as possible. That sort of dynamic in education really stymies social mobility in general, though. It's like opportunity hoarding.

jonmc12 9y ago

Reading the study (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2763720) I'm amazed it did not consider parental income. Not only does parental income correlate strongly to child income as adults, but also to college acceptance. Most importantly in this case, parental income is usually used to pay fraternity dues. Fraternities might give a strong sample set of students with poor parents being separated from students who have parents with moderate to high incomes. Not to mention the obvious cultural divisions that might keep a high percentage of low income students from being included in many fraternities.

fred_is_fred 9y ago
Are fraternity dues that onerous? At my school (which was now 15+ years ago) living in a fraternity was roughly cost equivalent (within 10-15%) to living in the dorms with a meal plan.
- TheAdamAndChe 9y ago
  Well for people without rich parents, the cost dorms with a meal plan is pretty onerous, and much more expensive than renting an apartment a little farther away. Adding 10-15% to that would limit it to the rich, the people who don't consider the cost, or the people who see the risk as worth it.

creatrixcordis 9y ago

who cares, if you know your shit, you walk in the interview and make them feel stupid, make them feel like you have a monopoly on knowledge, like it oozes out of you and drips to the floor and if they don't lick it off they might miss something, lol, then they would be stupid to pass on you, then they will surely want you on their team. but you can only do that if you really learn or you can bs to a professional level there are many ways into the castle, some people walk in the front door, some take the back door, some sneak through the side gate and some ride on the shoulders of others..., some fuck the manager or blow the boss, or maybe play golf at the same golf club or are in the same motorcycle club, or fuck the same prostitute and catch each other at the door and have an understanding, or have the same drug dealer if you are sitting on the sideline keeping score, you might end up hungry while someone eats your bread. it doesn't matter what color the cat is, as long as it catches mice. but my moms favorite quote was machiavelli's maxim, the end always justifies the means i guess the question is, if you would be in their shoes? you would read this article and say, damn right! i still think in a lot of corporate environments, money is definitely being made on the side by the decision makers when it comes time to pick an outsourcing firm, or award a contract to a contracting company, you know, you jack me off and i will jack you off later kinda thing, gotta grease the wheels of the company politics once in a while or else you might get caught not working

pavel_lishin 9y ago
> if you walk in the interview and make them feel stupid ... then you won't get hired, because nobody wants to hire an asshole with such poor social skills that they can't talk to someone without talking down to them.
- creatrixcordis 9y ago
  how is showing your mental prowess talking down to "them"?, that is what interviews are for, you probably don't want to work for anyone who can't stand in a room with someone smarter then them, remember everyone is different, you will only feel stupid for a little while or in a state of lacking something, but in some cultures this behavior would be taken as a direct insult, i agree with you there, but hopefully you don't live in those countries, where everything is personal and macho...

sudosteph 9y ago

The GPA vs Income thing is not really the interesting thing in this article. The REALLY interesting thing was that there was no corresponding benefit for women who joined sororities. The author kind of hand-waved over this with statements such as: > One reason for this may be that women are more likely to form social bonds with other women outside of these structures. Which honestly doesn't make a ton of sense. If they're saying that the bonds formed in sororities are less intense than those of fraternities b/c women socialize outside them, they really need something to back that claim up. The few women I know who did join sororities were very much dedicated to their "sisters" and it pretty much controlled their social life. If they're saying that men need same-sex friendships to get positive career effects, and that women are more likely to already get those with or without a sorority, that's also not logical. Especially if you consider they studied the impact of fraternities over a time that includes dates from when the college was men-only and claim the fraternity effect was consistent. If "same sex social bonds" was really the driving factor, then men from non-fraternities should have seen the same effect back when the school was single-sex, since all of them would have more (and nearly exclusively) same-sex friendships. Their other reasoning is: > sororities hadn’t been around for long enough to provide the same networking opportunities as the more established fraternities at the former men's college he and his co-authors studied. This one seems easy to falsify as well. Simply compare the salary outcomes from men in newer / less-established fraternities (I assume those pop up from time to time?) to those in older ones, and compare both of those to sororities with age of organization considered to see the difference. If age of fraternity is irrelevant, then it should be irrelevant to sororities as well. I'm of the opinion that fraternities are a good way to make connections with people who don't mind doing favors for other fraternity members, including hiring/promoting/vouching for them over non-members for jobs. Since women are less likely to be in positions of power where they can do "favors' like that in the first place, and because studies show that women are judged more harshly for promoting diversity (aka hiring other women - see: https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-for-promoting-diversity https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...) there is less opportunity or incentive to use those connections to give career favors to sorority sisters.

basseq 9y ago

The article (and study) makes a leap that doesn't appear to be supported in the data. Namely, that the social capital (“connections”) built in a fraternity are the reason for higher income. I would propose an alternate hypothesis: that men who seek out and/or have been a part of a fraternity are better at building unrelated social capital that does affect income. Or, put another way, that men who build a network of fraternity brothers are going to be better at building professional networks as well. While the former may bolster the latter, and while the two may not be mutually-exclusive sets, the career benefit comes from the latter.