Exclusive | Gen Z coeds are rushing to the altar as Ring By Spring gets a tradwife-era makeover

Generations of young women attending America’s conservative colleges have half-joked with each other about leaving campus with two things — a diploma and a husband.Long before TikTok reinvented the concept of staying barefoot, pregnant and in the kitchen as the now-pervasive “trad wife” aesthetic, earning your MRS degree was familiar campus lore — shorthand for a culture where marriage was treated less like a distant post-grad milestone and more like part of the plan.Madison Beach, 24, thought herself more modern, less susceptible than the girls who’d gone before her, when she arrived at Virginia’s Liberty University in the fall of 2020 to pursue a degree in child development.At one of the country’s strictest Christian schools, where RA’s prowl the dorms at night to enforce tight rules around fraternization between the sexes, dating isn’t done casually.

Sex and living together are supposed to be reserved for after “I do” — which can make relationships accelerate like a lead foot on the gas.“I thought it was kind of silly, like the whole idea,” Beach told The Post of the way women rushed into their future, so early in life — a concept known colloquially as “Ring by Spring.” Three days after arriving on campus, she met her future husband.

Two years later, she dropped out and got married.Even as young Americans increasingly delay marriage, the Ring By Spring tradition is thriving in some quarters — a sharp retort to modern-day “hang out” and hookup culture, but also a concept that has come around again as images of women in flowing skirts on bucolic rural farmsteads flood into social media feeds.

And the old tradition is now trending — young engagements and weddings are splashed out on social media, hungrily viewed by millions.And Hulu has even announced a new reality dating show casting college students — for their chance at a “Ring by Spring Break.” Just 67 percent of American high school seniors now say they...