UF’s Interfraternity Council partnered with Study Edge earlier this semester, and it’s paying off.
The tutoring company offered a 50 percent subsidy to all new members of UF IFC chapters who signed up for their services. IFC vice president of finance Joey Rosati said the initiative was more successful than anticipated — members from all 27 chapters used the program.
Coined the Pledge Edge Initiative, the program was created to help improve new members’ GPAs during their pledge semester, according to a press release.
“We really wanted to make it a goal to make sure that new members, or pledges, are receiving the best education possible,” said Rosati, who is also the executive board representative for the Pledge Edge Initiative. “You have these rumors out there that the pledge semester is detrimental to their grades.”
Rosati said the initiative consists of a joint fund between the IFC and Study Edge. The fund reimburses pledges for half of the cost of the Study Edge services they used during the Fall semester.
The fund is currently capped at $5,000, with half coming from the IFC’s scholarship budget and half coming from Study Edge’s budget.
“We didn’t expect to hit our cap,” Rosati said. “I think $100 we had remaining, which we ended up distributing to everybody.”
In order to use the program, new members had to say they were referred to Study Edge by their “pledge educator” when registering for services.
Recently, the fund was split up, with each chapter’s educator receiving a check for a portion of the money, along with an Excel spreadsheet that showed how much each new member should receive.
Rosati said the chapters with the most registrations were Alpha Epsilon Pi, Sigma Chi and Alpha Tau Omega. All IFC chapters received at least $50 from the program.
Rosati said the IFC is planning on continuing the initiative in the Spring. It is also planning on helping the Panhellenic Council start a similar program next Fall.
“It worked better than we thought, and it grew faster than we thought,” he said.
While it won’t be known if the program actually increased new members’ GPAs until early next semester, Tommy Hart, an 18-year-old accounting freshman and Sigma Alpha Epsilon brother, said Study Edge helped him study for his microeconomics class.
He said the discount provided through the Pledge Edge Initiative made him more likely to use Study Edge than he would have if the services had been full price.
Anne Grundhoefer, Study Edge’s director of marketing and expansion, said Study Edge knew how difficult becoming a member of a fraternity could be for new students who might not know the resources available to help them with their grades.
She said that while Study Edge wanted to try out the program with the Greek community, they could extend it to other groups at UF in the future. They are also looking to start similar programs at some of their expansion schools, including the University of Georgia and Florida State University.
