Many students look to the Greek system at their schools in order to meet such desires because fraternities foster brotherhood, friendship, and help to meet new people and establish relationships. However, many fraternities are recognized or distinguished from others by a particular characteristic of its members. Prime examples are divisions by race, religion, ethnicity, sports, and personality. For example, when a varsity soccer player pledges a fraternity, he convinces all of his friends to pledge there as well. As more soccer players pledge and get initiated into the fraternity, people eventually associate it with the similar athletic status of its members. The principles of homophyly and segregation facilitate the homogenizing of fraternities because the same types of people pledge those fraternities.

Information cascades contribute to this phenomenon because students will pledge the fraternity they feel fits them the best. They receive their private information from people who they have connections to, and these people are their friends, who they have more in common with from the beginning. Thus, they receive high signals from the same group of people: the group with which the fraternity is identified.

In addition, the already established status of the fraternity will discourage others who would not fit into it from joining. For instance, in a Jewish fraternity, the Jewish presence may intimidate non-Jewish students and dissuade them from rushing/pledging. The article, titled “Greek like still segregated at University of Alabama,” discusses how the fraternities are having a difficult time integrating members of different races into different fraternities. What the article states as “students…joining the organizations in which they feel most comfortable,” the students are merely joining the fraternity where they think that they will be part of the majority. When a fraternity is entirely composed of black members, others may feel less inclined to pledge because they will be in the minority and may be concerned that they may feel distant from the rest of the students.

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