Ivy League

The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education located in the Northeastern United States. The term is now also commonly used to refer to those eight schools considered as a group. In a wider sense, it is used to refer to the social group once strongly associated with these schools. The term became ubiquitous, especially in sports terminology, after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference founded in 1954, when much of the nation polarized around favorite college teams. The use of the phrase to refer to these schools as a group is widespread; Princeton notes that "the phrase is no longer limited to athletics, and now represents an educational philosophy inherent to the nation's oldest schools."[1] All of the Ivy League institutions share some general characteristics: they consistently place within the top 15 in the U.S. News & World Report college and university rankings; they rank within the top one percent of the world's academic institutions in terms of financial endowment; they attract top-tier students and faculty. Seven of the eight schools were founded during America's colonial period; the exception is Cornell, which was founded in 1865. Ivy League institutions, therefore, account for seven of the nine colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Ivies also are all located in the Northeast region of the United States and are privately owned and controlled. Although many of them receive funding from the federal or state governments to pursue research, only Cornell has state-supported academic units, termed statutory colleges, that are an integral part of the institution. Undergraduate enrollments among the Ivy League schools vary considerably, ranging from 4,078 at Dartmouth College to 13,700 at Cornell University, but they are generally larger than those of a traditional liberal arts college and smaller than those of a typical public state university.

Locations of Ivy League Schools