Key points from article in CNBC by Yoni Blumberg summarizing recent research on fraternity membership impact on income after college…

1) Joining a fraternity will cost ~$1,000 extra dollars a year in college

2) There is a substantial return-on-investment when salaries after graduation are calculated

3) Full study is available here - “Social Animal House: The Economic and Academic Consequences of Fraternity Membership,” 

4) The researchers found that “going Greek raises your income by 36% down the line. The academic cost, meanwhile, is a small one: a 0.25 point drop in GPA on the traditional 4-point-scale.

In other words, you might graduate with a 2.75 GPA while your classmate who didn’t pledge ends up with a 3.00. But if he makes $75,000 a year, you could expect to make $102,000.”

5) Because the researchers controlled for a host of variables which have influenced these findings, the results indicate that the relationship between fraternity membership and income are not just correlated, but actual causal.

6) The key descriptive term that could be used here is “social capital.” In this case, social capital is the network of relationships among men in the fraternity.  

7) The research, while robust and done on alumni over 40 graduation years, was focused on at Union College. 

8) The researchers did not find the same effect for sororities but this could have been that the college had not been coed for as many years so the alumni networks was not as robust as the fraternity network.

9) The researchers indicated several major reasons encapsulated under social capital - 1) access to the fraternity alumni community, 2) the emphasis on “soft” skills or emotional intelligence, and 3) when there are a substantial group of members seeking higher pay careers, this will influence the other men in the same direction.

10) Because these reasons are inclusive of any fraternity, the likelihood is that these findings are not just limited to Union College.