Writer: Richard Li
Editor: Izzy Bayani
The first weeks of the semester at UC Berkeley are notoriously accompanied by student organizations tabling on Sproul. The aggressive flyering and enthusiasm of these groups present a world of opportunity to build a tight-knit community, advance professional development, and create extensive alumni connections. However, for the most selective clubs, accessing these rewards requires a rigorous process that includes coffee chats, information sessions, interviews, and social events. The opportunity cost of community is often unexpectedly high, and the process stressful.
In July, the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania took direct action to address its clubs’ notoriously competitive recruitment process. Citing the Biden Administration’s Stop Campus Hazing Act, the mandate prohibits multi-round interviews and limits individual interviews to 30 minutes for clubs affiliated with the Wharton School. The guidelines recommend a “general body membership” system that facilitates progression to committees as opposed to outright rejecting such candidates through the traditional competitive selection process.
According to a report by The Daily Pennsylvanian, the updated policies state that recruitment activities “may be classified as hazing, even if they are traditional or longstanding club processes.” While it remains uncertain whether these changes will reverberate through universities with similarly competitive club recruitment environments, the Wharton policy provides a concrete framework and a compelling rationale for reevaluating the time investments inherent in club ecosystems at elite institutions. Currently, club applicants and members dedicate a significant portion of their time to the recruitment process, prompting an important yet often overlooked question: could their time be allocated more effectively?
Competitive universities such as UC Berkeley feature a variety of student organizations, some boasting acceptance rates below one percent. Club leaders have indicated that applicants typically invest varying amounts of time in the application process, ranging around 3 hours, while applicants themselves reported spending up to 9 hours. This time is often devoted to completing written applications, attending information sessions, engaging in coffee chats, participating in multiple interview rounds, and preparing for interviews. Active returning members have reported spending up to 15 hours on recruitment activities, with one club leader stating that the average returning member dedicates around six hours on tabling, coffee chats, reading applications, conducting interviews, and deliberating on selections.
Graphic By: Finna Wang
Given the stress and monotony of the process, the opportunity cost is often tangible. These precious hours at the start of a semester could otherwise be used for leisure and exploring events and resources such as research opportunities, office hours, and many more alternatives than recruiting for highly selective student organizations. For incoming freshmen and transfer students, juggling the intense time cost of club recruitment with getting acclimated to campus life presents an added challenge.
Proponents of the selective club recruitment system argue that the extensive, multi-staged application process serves as a necessary proxy for assessing future commitment and evaluating soft skills. One club leader justified that “by requiring potential new members to go through this process, we can begin to see their work ethic and passion, which dramatically improves the quality of the incoming new member class.” The process often begins before interviews through coffee chats that, while characterized as informal, come with an evaluative component.
Considering the objectives of predicting future engagement and evaluating merit, the Wharton School’s proposed model of nonselective “general body membership” for its affiliated student organizations offers a potential alternative. On paper (and barring enforcement considerations), observing actual performance instead of attempting to predict future performance would provide more credible evidence for engagement and applicant quality to decide upon committee progression. Removing the multiple rounds of interviews and reducing the process’s emphasis on networking could decrease the time cost required for club recruitment, alleviating applicant stress and disincentivizing hazing—a mutually beneficial scenario for both clubs and applicants. Students have long advocated for changes to the selective club recruitment system. However, the implementation of this “improvement” may be problematic.
In response to a hypothetical mandate banning multi-round interviews, a leader of a UC Berkeley club responded that they would simply “adapt by making coffee chats mandatory.” This reaction highlights a deep-seated resistance and defiance against such top-down regulation, likely rooted in the burden of managing an unvetted group of new members and a desire to preserve a specific, potentially exclusive, close-knit culture that such a mandate could destroy. The selective recruitment process is often among the many traditions that members bond over. Moreover, the difficult recruitment process itself creates a sense of prestige that endows membership with value, which clubs may want to preserve.
Moreover, the fundamental link between scarcity and desirability, which is central to commodity theory, may also play a crucial role, as the difficult recruitment process itself manufactures a sense of prestige that endows membership with value. Selectivity functions like a non-monetary Veblen effect. As the “price” of entry rises, via more coffee chats and longer applications and interviews, demand and perceived prestige can increase because difficulty signals status. Clubs may engineer scarcity and a reputation of exclusivity by deliberately keeping acceptance rates low, even when they have the capacity to expand. As membership is framed as belonging to an “elite few,” identity and status become tethered to the organization, making walking away harder.
This is where tradition can become a slippery slope. The same rationale that legitimizes difficult experiences as bonding opportunities can also be used to justify activities that induce stress and harm. Such a dynamic is powerfully intensified by the sunk cost fallacy, which explains behavior such as complying with demands due to prior invested time and effort. For an applicant who has already dedicated nine hours to the application process for a single club, each additional request becomes harder to refuse. Simultaneously, the phenomenon incentivizes clubs to perpetuate ritualistic behavior and tradition. This cycle, in which past investments justify further commitment, underlies the core of hazing activities and aligns with the Wharton School’s primary justification for prohibiting multi-round interviews. The guidelines emphasize the importance of preventing “activities that create barriers to access or impose undue stress.”
No solution is perfect: Forcing a general body membership model could burden student organizations and become a poison pill for close-knit club culture. However, current club recruitment practices may result in a misallocation of time and energy, catalyzing hazing driven by considerations of sunk costs. The Wharton School’s reforms prove that a viable alternative exists. Effective club recruitment systems ideally do more than uncritically prioritize tradition; they seek to balance student well-being and time costs while reliably assessing interest, ability, and commitment.
Featured Image by Maranda Vandergriff on Unsplash
