MIT Frats Face Financial Difficulties

The unusually low number of MIT freshmen pledging fraternities this year may cause some of the school's 33 frat houses severe financial difficulties, the chairman of the fraternity governing board said last week.

With only 350 freshman pledges for the 420 vacant housing slots in fraternities, "most of the fraternities won't be that much affected, but there are going to be some houses with severe financial problems, which may have to go co-ed," said senior Paul W. Parfomak, chairman of MIT's Inter-Fraternity Council (IFC).

Parfomak said that while most of the larger frat houses could afford some vacancies, the smaller houses are much more vulnerable. Vacancies would force a per-person increase in house bills, which could make living in the fraternities much more expensive than living in MIT dormitories, he said.

The IFC will sponsor several additional rush events in the spring to garner more pledges from the freshman class and to assess the long-term demographic trends facing the fraternities, Parfomak said.

"We need another rush to see what the trend is, but I don't expect a huge number of students to pledge" during the additional rush period, Parfomak said.

Parfomak attributed the high number of vacancies to the school's increasing number of women undergraduates.

During the past three years, the percentage of women undergraduates at MIT has risen from 20 percent to 40 percent.

When the student body was almost entirely male, the fraternity system could capture a relatively small percentage of men. But "currently, we have to capture about 60 percent of the men" to fill up the houses," Parfomak said.

Parfomak said the IFC hopes to attract more national sororities to the campus to encourage the increasing numbers of women to join independent housing groups. There are only two sororities on campus today.

"It would make sense to build some more sororities. We'd see an overall increase in the number of students in the Greek system," Parfomak said.