An Analysis of CMU's "Ring-By-Spring" Culture
As a former freshman, I know that most of you are coming into CMU with one goal in mind: marriage. You may think this is a far-fetched dream, but by winter break, your peers will be proposing left and right. Enormous patches of grass on the Mall will die from being crushed by all the knees of hopeful romantics popping the question. If you’re lucky, you’ll be on one side of this ritual or the other before March rolls around. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have to watch droves of men (and lesbians) dropping to their knees and wonder: “when will it be my turn?” Fear not: according to the Common Data Set, 95 percent of CMU students become engaged or married before the end of their first year of college. Anthropologists struggle to explain this phenomenon, with one saying, “We have no idea how this keeps happening. There’s no purity culture to speak of, but CMU’s students consistently seem eager to rush into marriage regardless. We suspect that students are afraid that if they don’t enter a committed relationship by the end of their first year, it’s never going to happen.”
And evidence shows that those fears are justified. CMU’s first year outcomes page, which shows students’ outcomes in the first year after graduation, shows that 95 percent of CMU students are engaged or married within a year after they graduate, meaning of course that not a single student gets engaged past their first year. Which means if you miss your shot in freshman year, you’ve got nothing to look forward to.
This “ring by spring” culture, as sociologists have called it, has been found to create stress amongst freshmen but greatly improves the morale of upperclassmen—or at least the 95% lucky enough to participate. For those who aren’t, depression abounds, life is hopeless, and nothing will go right ever again. “I think that’s an overreaction,” says a friend of the author. “I know she’ll get herself right eventually. She’s already starting to pull herself back together in her classes, even if she has to break down crying every weekend about how she’ll always be alone and no one will ever love her.” While parts of these claims are accurate, their implications are disputed.