Seventy-two percent of Washington and Lee undergraduates belong to a fraternity or sorority. At New York University the figure is 2 percent for men and 5 percent for women. Both numbers come from the same reporting form.
Greek life is one of the few things about a college that a seventeen-year-old will have a firm opinion about before they know anything else, and it is surprisingly difficult to research consistently. Campus tours rarely volunteer the number, and conventional rankings largely ignore it.
The number exists, though. Colleges report fraternity and sorority participation on the Common Data Set, and the College Transitions Dataverse compiles it for 362 institutions from 2024-25 forms and institutional websites. Setting that against enrollment and admissions data from IPEDS produces a clearer picture than anything a campus visit will give you, along with two findings that are not obvious.
The first is that at most campuses with Greek life, women join at substantially higher rates than men. The second is that the highest participation rates cluster at small colleges, not at the large state universities that dominate the popular image.
At Most Campuses, Sororities Are the Larger System
Of the 214 institutions reporting both figures, sorority participation exceeds fraternity participation at 151. Fraternity participation is higher at 40, and the two are equal at 23. The average gap runs 3.8 points in favor of sororities, and at the top of the range it is far wider than that.
Fraternity and sorority participation rates at the campuses with the largest gaps in each direction. Percentages are of undergraduate men and undergraduate women respectively. Data: College Transitions Dataverse Greek life table, November 2025, from 2024-25 Common Data Set forms and institutional websites.
Wake Forest is the extreme case: 28 percent of men are in fraternities and 65 percent of women are in sororities, a 37-point gap. The College of Wooster runs 35 and 65. Tulane runs 32 and 53, Auburn 27 and 47, Ole Miss 37 and 54.
The pattern is strongest in the South and at small Southern liberal arts colleges, but it is not confined to them. Clemson, Elon, Furman, Arkansas, Davidson, Tennessee, Wofford and Syracuse all show gaps of 16 points or more.
The reversals are worth knowing too, because they are concentrated in a recognizable type of institution. MIT has the largest fraternity-favoring gap in the dataset, with 41 percent of men in fraternities against 25 percent of women in sororities. Johns Hopkins runs 22 and 13, RPI 18 and 11, Florida Tech 9 and 3. Technical institutions with historically male-skewed enrollments produce the inverted pattern.
For a family, this matters because the headline campus figure conceals it. A young woman considering Wake Forest is looking at a social system that roughly two-thirds of her female classmates will join. A young man at the same campus is looking at something less than half that size. Those are different experiences of the same college, and no single number describes both.
The Most Greek Campuses Are Small Ones
The popular image of Greek life is a large state university with a row of houses. The data points somewhere else.
The 25 campuses with the highest average of fraternity and sorority participation rates. Orange marks an institution enrolling fewer than 5,000 undergraduates. Wabash is a men’s college, so its figure reflects fraternity participation only. Data: College Transitions Dataverse, November 2025; IPEDS fall enrollment, fall 2024.
Washington and Lee tops the list at 72 percent for both men and women, from an undergraduate population of 1,886. Wabash follows at 59 percent with 866 students, Sewanee at 58 with 1,644, Centre at 52 with 1,404, Wooster at 50 with 1,738. Fourteen of the top 25 enroll fewer than 5,000 undergraduates.
The large universities that do appear are Southern and specific: Ole Miss at 46 percent of 21,585 undergraduates, Alabama at 38 percent of 34,389, Auburn at 37 percent of 27,907, South Carolina at 33 percent of 30,187, Arkansas at 32 percent of 28,859.
Average Greek participation rate plotted against undergraduate enrollment on a logarithmic scale, for all campuses reporting participation. Data: College Transitions Dataverse, November 2025; IPEDS fall enrollment, fall 2024.
Grouping by size makes the pattern visible. Campuses under 2,500 undergraduates average an index of 23.5. Those from 2,500 to 10,000 average 17.3, those from 10,000 to 20,000 average 12.5, and those over 20,000 average 13.8. The relationship is not a clean gradient, and across all 219 reporting campuses the rank correlation between enrollment and participation is only -0.22. What the data shows is narrower and more useful: the top of the range is dominated by small colleges. Students who assume the strongest Greek systems are always at large state universities should broaden that search considerably.
Part of the explanation may be arithmetic. A college of 1,500 students with eight fraternities and eight sororities has organizations that must recruit a large fraction of each class to fill. A university of 35,000 with sixty chapters can run a highly visible Greek system that still touches a small minority of students. Culture, region, residential structure and institutional history plausibly matter too, and nothing here separates them.
Selectivity Tells You Almost Nothing
A common assumption is that Greek life thins out as colleges become more selective. It does not, at least not until the bottom of the selectivity range.
Among reporting campuses admitting under 15 percent of applicants, the average index is 19.6. Between 15 and 30 percent admitted, 18.2. Between 30 and 50 percent, 18.8. Between 50 and 75 percent, 17.3. Only among campuses admitting more than 75 percent does the figure drop, to 13.1. Across the 150 campuses admitting three-quarters or fewer of their applicants, the correlation between admit rate and participation is -0.08 and is not statistically distinguishable from zero.
Dartmouth sits at 33 percent for both men and women. Duke runs 30 and 42, Stanford 21 and 25, Vanderbilt 24 and 28. Washington and Lee, the most Greek campus in the dataset, admits 14 percent of applicants. Northwestern, which admits 8 percent, reports 14 and 18. Across campuses admitting fewer than three-quarters of applicants, there is no apparent relationship between selectivity and Greek participation.
The Colleges Where It Does Not Exist
One hundred and five of the 362 institutions in this dataset report neither fraternities nor sororities, and the list is heavy with names families most often assume are Greek-dominated.
| Institutions with no fraternities or sororities | Admit rate |
| California Institute of Technology | 3% |
| Harvard University | 4% |
| Princeton University | 5% |
| Bowdoin College | 7% |
| Colby College | 7% |
| Pomona College | 7% |
| Swarthmore College | 7% |
| Rice University | 8% |
| Williams College | 8% |
| Amherst College | 9% |
| Claremont McKenna College | 10% |
| University of Notre Dame | 11% |
| Middlebury College | 11% |
| Haverford College | 12% |
The most selective institutions reporting no fraternities and no sororities, by fall 2024 admit rate. Data: College Transitions Dataverse, November 2025; IPEDS admissions component, fall 2024.
Harvard and Princeton have no Greek system, though both have final clubs or eating clubs that occupy adjacent social ground and are not captured in this reporting. Williams eliminated fraternities in 1962 and Colby in 1984, and Bowdoin and Middlebury dismantled theirs during the 1990s. Amherst withdrew institutional recognition in 1984 and extended the prohibition to unrecognized fraternities in 2014. The service academies have none. Notre Dame has none.
This is the single most useful part of the dataset for a student with a strong preference in either direction. There is no recognized fraternity or sorority system to rush at Pomona or Swarthmore or Rice.
And the Colleges That Will Not Say
Thirty-seven institutions report having fraternities and sororities and decline to publish participation rates. Six of them admit 20 percent or fewer applicants.
| Greek life present, participation not reported | Admit rate | Undergraduates |
| University of Chicago | 4% | 7,598 |
| Yale University | 4% | 6,814 |
| University of California, Los Angeles | 9% | 33,475 |
| Cornell University | 9% | 16,128 |
| University of Virginia | 17% | 17,885 |
| Colorado College | 18% | 2,031 |
| University of California, Irvine | 29% | 30,204 |
| Trinity College | 29% | 2,204 |
| University of California, Santa Barbara | 33% | 23,181 |
| University of Washington, Seattle | 39% | 40,684 |
| Texas A&M University | 57% | 60,710 |
| Pennsylvania State University | 61% | 42,604 |
Institutions reporting active Greek organizations without publishing participation figures, ordered by admit rate. Data: College Transitions Dataverse, November 2025; IPEDS admissions and fall enrollment components, fall 2024.
Chicago, Yale, UCLA, Cornell and Virginia all decline. So do Penn State, Texas A&M, Virginia Tech, Rutgers across all three campuses, and five of the nine University of California campuses. At several of these campuses Greek life is a visible presence, which makes the missing figure particularly consequential for families trying to assess campus culture.
A family researching any of these campuses will not find the figure in a guidebook, because it has not been reported. The workaround is to ask the admissions office directly, and to ask a student separately.
What These Numbers Do Not Capture
Participation rates measure membership, not influence. They indicate roughly how common fraternity and sorority membership is, and nothing about how much of campus social life runs through those organizations. A campus reporting 15 percent can still have a social calendar organized around fraternity houses, and a campus at 30 percent can have a Greek system most students barely notice.
Nor are these figures standardized across institutions. Colleges differ in which Greek-letter organizations they include in their reported totals, and the Common Data Set does not provide enough detail to reconstruct those decisions. Historically Black and multicultural Greek organizations may be represented differently from campus to campus, and professional and service fraternities may be counted separately. Howard, which reports roughly 1 percent for both men and women, is a useful warning: a reported membership figure does not necessarily capture the cultural importance of Greek-letter organizations on a campus.
Reporting practice varies in other ways. Some institutions report the share of all undergraduates, others the share of eligible students, and the Common Data Set instruction is not specific enough to force consistency. Comparisons between two campuses a point or two apart are not meaningful. Comparisons between 5 percent and 40 percent are.
Finally, these are 2024-25 figures. Several campuses have suspended chapters or entire councils since, and a few colleges have moved to defer recruitment to sophomore year, which changes participation among first-year students without changing the headline rate.
How to Use This When Visiting
Look up the figure for the student’s own gender rather than the campus average. The gap between the two runs above 15 points at more than a dozen colleges, and at Wake Forest it is 37.
Do not assume large universities are the high-participation category. The top of the range is dominated by small colleges, and a campus of 1,500 where half the students join is a harder place to opt out than a university of 30,000 where a fifth do.
Do not use selectivity as a proxy. Dartmouth, Duke and Washington and Lee are all highly selective and all heavily Greek. Northwestern is more selective than any of them and reports 14 percent for men and 18 for women.
For counselors: this is a fit variable that students hold strong opinions about and rarely research, and it is one of the few where the data is unambiguous and free. Pull the number for the student’s gender at every college on the list before the first visit, and flag the thirty-seven non-reporters as questions to ask on campus rather than gaps to ignore. For a student who is certain in either direction, the 105 colleges reporting no fraternities or sororities and the two dozen above an index of 35 are the two lists worth having in hand early.
Sorting out which campuses match a student’s social preferences is less quantifiable than most of what goes into a college list, which is exactly why the parts that can be measured are worth measuring.
Methodology
Participation figures come from the College Transitions Dataverse Greek life table, updated November 2025 and compiled from 2024-25 Common Data Set forms and institutional websites. The table covers 362 institutions. Where 2024 data was unavailable, the most recent available figure is used, and those cases are flagged in the underlying table.
Of the 362, 105 report neither fraternities nor sororities, 37 report having them without publishing participation rates, and 220 publish at least one figure. Two hundred and fourteen publish both a fraternity and a sorority rate, and those are the campuses used for the gap analysis.
Percentages are drawn from the undergraduate column of the Common Data Set social-organizations item, of undergraduate men for fraternities and undergraduate women for sororities. Several institutions also report a separate first-year figure, which differs; those are not used here. Washington and Lee, for example, reports 67 percent of first-year men and 72 percent of undergraduate men, and the undergraduate figure is the one shown. Where an institution is single-sex or reports only one figure, the combined rate used for ranking reflects the single available number; Wabash and Morehouse are men’s colleges and Spelman and Barnard are women’s colleges. Two institutions, Trinity College and the University of Dallas, indicate active organizations without any usable figure and are grouped with the non-reporters.
The combined rate used for the ranking and the size analysis is the simple average of the fraternity and sorority rates, referred to throughout as a participation index. It is not a share of the total student body, since the two rates have different denominators and the sex balance of the undergraduate population varies by campus. It should be read as an index of how Greek a campus is rather than as a membership headcount.
Enrollment, admit rate and institutional characteristics come from the IPEDS fall enrollment and admissions components for fall 2024, joined on UnitID. Three hundred and sixty of the 362 institutions matched, and 219 have both a participation index and enrollment. Correlations reported in the text are Pearson coefficients for the selectivity relationship and a Spearman rank coefficient for the enrollment relationship.
Data: College Transitions Dataverse, Greek life participation table, updated November 2025, compiled from 2024-25 Common Data Set forms and institutional websites. IPEDS fall enrollment and admissions components, fall 2024, U.S. Department of Education. Participation percentages are of undergraduate men and undergraduate women respectively and reflect institutional reporting practice, which is not standardized across colleges. Charts: College Transitions Data Team.
