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Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

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Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#11

Post by bitwize »

sbge wrote: post #6
maxerickson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why claim "Alpha" exist? Before getting too up in arms it's probably worthwhile to see what the actual paper claims.

err, what?

The researcher who coined the term "alpha male" for wolves later rescinded any claim to the term's validity. Turned out he was studying "packs" of random wolves kept in captivity, and the "fights for dominance" were actually territorial disputes between unrelated wolves. Packs in the wild consist of an elder mated pair and their adult children. So in the wild, "alpha wolf" is more like "grandpa or grandma wolf".

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#12

Post by EliRivers »

sbge wrote: post #6
maxerickson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why claim "Alpha" exist? Before getting too up in arms it's probably worthwhile to see what the actual paper claims.

err, what?

He's disputing the belief that there is such a thing as an "alpha" male type, outside and beyond the circular definition that anyone who is a "winner" in life is an alpha male; I suspect the belief that this is real is (rightly or wrongly) so thoroughly embedded that people don't notice themselves believing in it without having checked the evidence.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#13

Post by roywiggins »

sbge wrote: post #4

Or Alpha males have greater tendency to join frats and to progress into leadership and push for greater pay... Why claim causal link here?

From the paper:

> In this paper, we identify the causal effect of fraternity membership on college grades and future income levels by exploiting time variation in the college’s social and residential environment. We use the presence of theme houses and non-Greek social houses and the presence of female students on campus, all of which may affect students’ choices bout whether to join a Greek organization, as instruments or reek membership.These changes allow us to identify shifts in he probability of fraternity membership that are plausibly exogenous and, thereby, to estimate the impact of fraternity membership on an individual’s academic and economic performance. We include controls for student human and social capital endowments to alleviate concerns that the policy changes that generate our instruments may have altered the composition of the student body. An additional advantage of using these instruments is that they are clearly choice variables from the perspective of the college administration.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#14

Post by matthewowen »

sbge wrote: post #6
maxerickson wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why claim "Alpha" exist? Before getting too up in arms it's probably worthwhile to see what the actual paper claims.

err, what?

Look at the article. Even just the abstract. It claims that changes at Northwestern's campus meant that a type of student who previously didn't join frats started to join frats.

By looking at those students, you attempt to control for "interest in joining a frat" as a variable, and look at the outcomes for people with equivalent interest who either did or did not join a frat.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#15

Post by akovaski »

sbge wrote: post #4

Or Alpha males have greater tendency to join frats and to progress into leadership and push for greater pay... Why claim causal link here?

Agreed (not necessarily on the alpha male bit), I don't see how they can claim a causal link with just survey data. Correlation, sure, but even that's questionable with self-reported data.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#16

Post by kelnos »

ghostlygpa wrote: post #2

From personal experience, joining a fraternity definitely affected my grades negatively. I ended up graduating with around a 3.1 after a few rough semesters far below that. Having said that, the connections I made have been absolutely invaluable and I'd attribute all of the success I've had in my career to either my work experience as a student or the relationships I made in the frat.

Hell, I wasn't even in a frat, but my success since college had little to do with GPA (I think GPA alone is just a very poor predictor of success. There are a ton of other, much more important factors.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#17

Post by beebmam »

BoorishBears wrote: post #3

Unless you're already about to fail, few, if any, employers will care about your GPA, and joining a large network of college graduates who share camaraderie can't hurt when it comes to finding well paying positions and moving up in organizations

GPA is virtually meaningless to me as an interviewer. There are so many more important things to me.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#18

Post by Retric »

bagels wrote: post #8
sbge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

err, what?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_(ethology)#Controversy "Researcher L. David Mech, one of the primary creators of the Alpha male hypothesis for wolves, later found additional evidence that the concept of an Alpha male may have been an erroneous interpretation of incomplete data and formally disavowed this terminology in 1999. He explained that it was heavily based on the behavior of captive packs consisting of unr…

Alpha, Beta, Omega etc is commonly used by primate researchers and thus is far more relevant for human behavior.

Wolf behavior is mostly irrelevant in that context.

Re: Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership

#20

Post by wickawic »

EliRivers wrote: post #12
sbge wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

err, what?

He's disputing the belief that there is such a thing as an "alpha" male type, outside and beyond the circular definition that anyone who is a "winner" in life is an alpha male; I suspect the belief that this is real is (rightly or wrongly) so thoroughly embedded that people don't notice themselves believing in it without having checked the evidence.

It is slightly strange. The related concept of 'type A' vs 'type B' personalities is useful (even if not backed by science) to bucket people based on their general behavior. But only with men do we take that single step further and say that the 'type A'-ness is actually an intrinsic property of their being instead of just a way they behave.
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