The Interfraternity Council and the Office of Co-Curricular Programs has decided to enforce a 2.5 minimum required GPA for fraternity recruitment.
IFC president Alex Krotulski, forensic chemistry senior, said this is a welcomed and necessary change.
“The GPA requirement change came about this year as a way of improving the scholarship aspect of the Interfraternity Council fraternities,” Krotulski said. “The overall GPA last spring was significantly lower than desired and in the last two semesters the overall GPA of the fraternities has not risen to a desired level.”
Heather Roundtree, director of the office of co-curricular programs, said the implementation of the requirement puts Loyola’s Greek organizations more in line with recruitment standards nationally.
“Most importantly, this change reflects the Greek organizations’ commitment to academic excellence,” Roundtree said. “I am proud of the Interfraternity Council and their efforts to increase the academic standards for all of their organizations. Their efforts throughout the last semester, combined with the National Pan-Hellenic Council and Panhellenic Council, have already proved successful with the All-Greek GPA at 3.0 for Fall 2012 beating the All-Undergraduate GPA. It takes steps such as increasing our standards at the recruitment process to ensure we keep improving academically.”
Krotulski said that the response has been positive, but some questioned whether the new GPA requirement affected this year’s recruitment.
“After the lower than normal turn out for recruitment this year, many people were approaching me and blaming the turn out on the GPA change. I informed everyone that the GPA change was something that is not going to have a smooth overturn but it will definitely be a good change for IFC and the fraternities in the future,” Krotulski said.
Jerry Reese, IFC vice-president of recruitment and mass communication junior, thinks that the change is both positive and negative.
“We’re going to up the GPA, but it hurts our number of guys, which we also need to go up. We have a lot of quality guys going through recruitment, and some quality guys who couldn’t go through because they were just a few points under,” Reese said.
According to Krotulski, the GPA requirement change also happened to match the other Greek Life councils. The Panhellenic Council and the National Pan-Hellenic Council both have a minimum requirement of 2.5 GPA.
“We thought it would be a perfect time to match their GPA requirement and hopefully in a few years we will match their scholarly success,” said Krotulski.
“With the GPA being raised, those young men who are below a 2.5 GPA are now required to wait for a later recruitment and strongly being encouraged to work on grades now, rather than fraternal or social life,” Krotulski said. “After all, we are all students at Loyola before we are members of Greek organizations. Education is a top priority.”
Roundtree also said that students should focus on academics and, if students are not succeeding academically, their priorities should be improving their grades and not joining a student organization that requires a large time commitment.
“I absolutely think that increasing the GPA requirement for men to participate in the recruitment process will have a positive impact on the fraternities. Bringing new members into their organizations with a higher GPA should help the chapters to maintain higher academic standards,” said Roundtree.
“Like every change that goes through the Greek community, especially through IFC, people usually are initially against change, just because it’s something new and we don’t want to break ‘tradition,’ but eventually come around,” said Krotulski. “We want to have the highest GPA on campus, we want to be able to brag about it, but we are not there yet.”
Hannah Iannazzo can be reached at [email protected]
