To move this away from the frat issue specifically, I think about this same issue whenever faculty are trying to start an initiative that depends on getting around 10-20 active participants annually on a small campus to be sustainable. Often we look at large universities and say "see? look! they have something just like what we're imagining--a center, a group, a collaboration, a publication--so we know it can work". And what we're missing is that at our scale, we maybe only have 4-5 people keen to be involved like that for almost anything more specialized than "all faculty". Or maybe none, or maybe only 3 people and they're all at different generational points. So yes, I suppose it's so for the students too--finding your people can be hard, and you have to recalibrate your preferences and interests a bit. On the other hand, you're also not lost in a sea of people; you're known and knowable, and maybe find it easier to get to know folks who you didn't think were your people.
Oh, absolutely, there are related scale issues in all sorts of places-- some years back, a handful of us made an attempt to go after some funding targeted at physics teacher education, but ended up having to give it up because we're just never going to have the numbers needed to get the kind of stats and community they wanted to see. Unless we wanted to go all-in on just that and have it be the only focus of the department, and that wouldn't really fit with the rest of what we do.
Another thing that comes into play here that I didn't have time to go into in the post is the combination of incomplete identity and judgement that are found in the high school students who are making the choice of where to go. There are always going to be some people who honestly believed they would fit in a particular place and just turn out to be wrong about either who they are or what the place they're going to is. Which is why even the best schools don't manage 100% satisfaction and retention...
Well, and some of them don't necessarily accurately describe their vibe for all sorts of reasons. My daughter went to a place for her first year that promised it had a balance of attention to all divisions but she was the only student to raise her hand out of more than a hundred students in her first-semester dorm when they asked who was thinking of majoring in the humanities. She decided pretty quickly to transfer. Sometimes you can't find your people because they literally aren't there.
To move this away from the frat issue specifically, I think about this same issue whenever faculty are trying to start an initiative that depends on getting around 10-20 active participants annually on a small campus to be sustainable. Often we look at large universities and say "see? look! they have something just like what we're imagining--a center, a group, a collaboration, a publication--so we know it can work". And what we're missing is that at our scale, we maybe only have 4-5 people keen to be involved like that for almost anything more specialized than "all faculty". Or maybe none, or maybe only 3 people and they're all at different generational points. So yes, I suppose it's so for the students too--finding your people can be hard, and you have to recalibrate your preferences and interests a bit. On the other hand, you're also not lost in a sea of people; you're known and knowable, and maybe find it easier to get to know folks who you didn't think were your people.
Oh, absolutely, there are related scale issues in all sorts of places-- some years back, a handful of us made an attempt to go after some funding targeted at physics teacher education, but ended up having to give it up because we're just never going to have the numbers needed to get the kind of stats and community they wanted to see. Unless we wanted to go all-in on just that and have it be the only focus of the department, and that wouldn't really fit with the rest of what we do.
Another thing that comes into play here that I didn't have time to go into in the post is the combination of incomplete identity and judgement that are found in the high school students who are making the choice of where to go. There are always going to be some people who honestly believed they would fit in a particular place and just turn out to be wrong about either who they are or what the place they're going to is. Which is why even the best schools don't manage 100% satisfaction and retention...
Well, and some of them don't necessarily accurately describe their vibe for all sorts of reasons. My daughter went to a place for her first year that promised it had a balance of attention to all divisions but she was the only student to raise her hand out of more than a hundred students in her first-semester dorm when they asked who was thinking of majoring in the humanities. She decided pretty quickly to transfer. Sometimes you can't find your people because they literally aren't there.