Tuesday, November 4, 2014
Research Blog 7: Your Case
My chief example in my argument is that Greek Life is always being portrayed negatively but there are many positives to being in a fraternity or sorority. Greek members go on to make more money than non greeks, greeks are more involved on campus, and greeks raise the most money for philanthropies on campus. These are all positives that the media never decides to bring up because they only focus on the violence and drinking of fraternities. I have found some research pertaining to the positive effects of being in Greek Life. One stat shows that more greek life members graduate college than non-greek members. Some details that might be useful to know is that greek life helps young college students learn great social skills and how to interact with others. Being social is a huge advantage in the real world and it all stems from greek life. Greek life allows you to meet so many different kinds of people all over campus and even off campus. It opens many doors for you later on in life because of the networking skills you pick up.
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Discussing the positives of Greek life is definitely worth doing, but your ultimate focus should be on a specific positive -- whether it be networking, social integration, soft skills development, or whatever. You need a focus to give your paper depth. Otherwise it might end up a report on various positives of Greek life.
ReplyDeleteOne issue to keep in mind, by the way -- and it is brought home by Paying for the Party -- is that Greeks are highly selective of members, so that their success can be attributed as much to selection as to value added. If you want to argue for "value added," then you need to offer specific evidence to show how Greek life helps to cultivate traits or advantages in its members. Alternately, you could talk about the value of selectivity -- especially as a way of increasing networking potential (as Armstrong and Hamilton tend to emphasize in their analysis.)