Ivy League Colleges

The Ivy League is made up of eight private colleges and universities in the Northeast United States: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. Although the Ivy League is technically an athletic conference it is often more renowned for highly selective and competitive admissions criteria, high and traditional academic standards, and financial endowment. The Council of Ivy Group Presidents is the governing body and determines common procedures. All but Cornell were founded before the U.S. Revolution, are among the oldest higher education institutions in the United States, and provided most of the earliest academic infrastructure for the American Colonies, including school founders, boards, administrators, and distinguished faculty. This entry describes the history, the characteristics, and importance of Ivy League schools to talented students.

The term Ivy League was invented in 1933 by Caswell Adams, a sportswriter for the New York Tribune who used it as a disparaging reference to antiquated institutions that were typified by ivy plants covering their aged historic buildings. Specifically, Adams meant to dismiss the substandard football teams at Princeton and Columbia by referring to them as “only Ivy League.” The term resonated with Stanley Woodward, a fellow sportswriter who used ivy colleges to describe the 1933 football season of the fictitious league of eastern colleges. Two years later, in 1935, Associated Press sports editor, Alan Gould, published the first printed form of the exact term Ivy League, and later that year, New York Herald Tribune sportswriter Jesse Abramson began to publish a regular report of standings for the nonexistent Ivy League. From there, sportswriters, journalists, and others picked up the term to refer to some of the oldest colleges and universities in the northeastern United States. The actual Ivy League was not formalized until 1954 when each of the eight presidents signed the Ivy Group Agreement that established athletic, academic, and financial standards for the intercollegiate teams and ensured that eligibility for sports would not cloud admission to the institution. The term Public Ivies was coined when, more recently, an administrator from Princeton published a list of 30 public colleges and universities comparable to the Ivy League in academic excellence but with lower price tags.

Ivy League schools attract students from around the world who desire a premium education grounded in European and U.S. traditions within a competitive environment, and have or can find the means to afford it. All told, about 10 percent of applicants are admitted and nearly 140,000 rejected, including some valedictorians with perfect 4.0 grade point averages and perfect scores on the SAT. The eight institutions compete fiercely for students, boast of rejection rates, keep large and sophisticated data banks, and finance aggressive marketing strategies to scoop up the top students.

Each year, the U.S. News and World Report ranks the best U.S. colleges on indicators of quality including selectivity and admission, class size, retention rates, number of full-time faculty, and alumni giving. Of more than 250 national institutions listed, the top 3 schools are consistently Ivy League. All 8 rank in the top 15. In addition, each school has its own influential alumni and Nobel [Page 499]Laureates, pours millions into research, and makes notable advancements in a variety of fields.

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