While populations of sororities and fraternities decrease throughout the country, greek life at Eastern continues to thrive, while groups concentrate on quality instead of quantity.

Greek life has seen a dramatic population increase at Eastern, a significant change since the early 1990s.

Although, there has been a significant decline in the membership of greek organizations nationwide throughout the 1990s, Richard McKaig, executive director of the Center for the Study of the College Fraternity, said Eastern has not complied with this statistic. In fact, the university has done quite the opposite.

The University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana is nearly one-fourth greek and has seen a participation drop over the past five years.

However, Bob Dudolski, director of greek life, said Eastern has seen a 21 percent increase in greek participation. With the arrival of a record-setting number of freshmen this year, greek enrollment is expected to increase another 1 percent.

Despite the increase, greek members say they are keeping a closer eye on who they invite to become members of their organizations.

Students at Eastern rush a fraternity or sorority for many reasons. The close connection that greeks maintain with the university is the main cause for the significant growth of its greek system. Students at Eastern want to get involved with the school and, in turn, can choose the greek system, Dudolski said.

Delta Zeta sorority is expecting an increased enrollment this year after bidding on 41 women to take part in its organization.

“We focus on taking girls that are willing to do stuff and make grades,” said Sara Easton-Shouse, president of Delta Zeta. “We ended up taking so many because we had so many good girls come through rush.”

Fraternities are going about rush the same way.

“Our philosophy is if we work hard enough at rush, we can get quantity with quality,” said Ryan Spatz, president of Sigma Pi fraternity.

Sigma Pi currently has 93 members and is one of the largest fraternities on campus and hopes to add more members after rush this coming weekend.

Other sororities take a different approach.

“We … have standards we go by in order to choose women to be in our sorority,” said Angie Jones, president of Alpha Sigma Alpha sorority.

“If there is a problem with a member they will be put on social probation, however, it has not happened to a member since I have been here,” Spatz said.

Even though greeks have higher standards this year during rush, it seems they all hope to gain as many members as they can with good qualities.

“We have a seven core values system in which we look for certain qualities in women; three of these qualities are enjoyment, balance and generosity,” Jones said.

“The close bond that has been made between the university and greek students has benefited our greek system. Greek students today hold a higher level of accountability than students ten years ago,” Dudolski said.