what makes a fraternity top tier vs bottom tier?

Alpha Delt is bottom tier you geed

Tightness of brotherhood + litness of parties

it may have been worth joining a frat 2 or 3 years ago but greek life is on a huge decline rn.

most of the chapters are both loved and hated depending on who you talk to, and everyone has an opinion.

you kinda just have to decide what kind of douchebag people are going to think you are when you wear the letters to class

Really similar to how you'd think about the cool kids in high school tbh. The "top frats" like sig chi and aepi have lots of guys who are super outgoing, into sports, like to party/drink, etc. The bottom frats like tke and alpha delt tend to have larger proportions of guys with more stereotypically dorky interests (and of course there's nothing wrong with that, I'm sure they all still have an equally good greek experience). The competitiveness of rush/how difficult it is to receive a bid is also somewhat of a factor, but that's not always the case...like recently, alpha delt has been pretty competitive to get into, but people still consider it to be on the "bottom".

From a female perspective, the relative rankings don't really matter so much except for the handful of frats who are perceived to be more towards the socially awkward end of the spectrum. Most of my girl friends prefer going to parties at frats you'll usually see ranked in the middle of these lists, like snu or beta.