@tsarstepan,
Oh, it's far from perfect. And I know it's been abused in the sense of some chapters just favoring the pretty gals (very high school). I went to a convention when I was a sophomore (so I was 18) and was chatting with an alum from somewhere in the south about the gals in the chapter. She asked what else we were involved in and I told her one of our members was the secretary to the local NAACP chapter. This alum said something along the lines of, "Oh, we never initiated black girls."
But there's also a lot of baby in with that bathwater. When I first went to law school, the only people I knew in Delaware were alumnae from my sorority.