Social Mobility Aspirations and Fraternity Membership

Abstract

A STEREOTYPE has the fraternity pin as a key to obtaining a successful job on completion of college. For example, a recent study on a large university campus indicated that a sizeable number of persons believed that fraternities directly contribute to the attainment of a desirable job.' The purpose of this paper is to determine whether one's aspirations are related to whether or not he joins a fraternity upon arrival on the college campus. Is there any evidence which indicates that men do join fraternities because they are viewed as a means for social mobility? A study by Jackson and Winkler revealed that college freshmen at the University of North Dakota who pledged fraternities had higher occupational aspirations than those who did not pledge.2 A study by Levine and Sussmann provides other indirect evidence.3 Sons of manual laborers who joined fraternities were more likely to have rejected their parents than the sons of manual laborers who had not joined. The authors speculated that the group which joined was upwardly mobile and traded their parents' values for fraternity membership as a means for mobility attainment. The Jackson and Winkler study suggests that social mobility aspirations and fraternity membership may be positively associated, but the study omits important controls. For example, it is well-known that men who join fraternities are more likely to be from the upper social