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Almost a year ago, I wrote about the benefits of joining big clubs. Turns out, I didn’t know the half of it. As rush season returns to campuses across the country, it’s become clear that there is big money to be made in Greek life—at least for some sorority sisters.

“Sorority recruitment … has become a social-media Super Bowl with massive moneymaking potential for college girls,” Wall Street Journal reporter Sarah Spellings observed last year. Brands now court sorority chapters and individual members, sending products, arranging trips, and paying students to promote everything from clothing to cosmetics.

Take Blythe Beardsley. When Spellings wrote about her last September, she was a senior studying physiology at the University of Arizona and a member of Kappa Kappa Gamma. A recruitment video featuring Beardsley dancing to Gwen Stefani’s “The Sweet Escape” drew more than 38 million views. The attention proved lucrative.

Showpo, an Australian fashion brand, flew Beardsley and her mom to New York Fashion Week, paid for their hotel, and gave her its newest clothing collection. In return, she filmed several videos for the company’s social media. Today, she is what you call a micro-influencer, with over 23,000 followers on Instagram and over 250,000 on TikTok.

Then there is Kylan Darnell, whom Spellings crowned the “queen of RushTok.” Darnell arrived at the University of Alabama in 2022 with 150,000 TikTok followers. Three years later, she had 1.3 million and was making as much as six figures in some months through brand deals and social media commissions. She expected to graduate debt-free. She now works as a full-time content creator and frequently appears on ESPN.

There are worse ways to make a living, though I suppose the lesson here is that being young, attractive, and good at TikTok is a more marketable combination than many college majors. Indeed, the few colleges and universities now offering bachelor’s degrees in content creation may have stumbled upon one of the more direct education-to-workforce pipelines in higher ed.

But it’s not just sorority sisters making big bucks.

Salient this week, too, is the story of Mississippian Shelly Gates, a former elementary school teacher who charges as much as $20,000 to decorate a single dorm room. As the New York Post reports, Gates has turned move-in day into a luxury business. She outfits dorm rooms with custom bedding, elaborate headboards, rugs, curtains, artwork, and other furnishings that make dorm rooms look like boutique hotel rooms.

The $20,000 price tag has stirred plenty of online commentary about wealth inequality. I think rightly so. But the joke is on me for not getting a degree in interior design.

Good for these women, I say. Indeed, the boys need to take notes, especially the frat bros who this week were reported to be part of a cocaine ring at Penn State.

I doubt the boys are going to get much traction with dance videos, and I’m not sure anyone’s trusting them with interior design. But gee, guys, you don’t have to break the law to make big money.

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