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The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States. The term is most commonly used to refer to those eight schools considered as a group. The term also has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism.

The term became official, especially in sports terminology, after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference in 1954,when much of the nation polarized around favorite college teams. The use of the phrase is no longer limited to athletics, and now represents an educational philosophy inherent to the nation’s oldest schools.

All of the Ivy League’s institutions place near the top in the U.S. News & World Report college and university rankings and rank within the top one percent of the world’s academic institutions in terms of financial endowment. 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 Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The Ivies are all in the Northeast geographic region of the United States. They are all considered to be “private” schools, although Cornell has several state-supported “statutory” colleges which are an integral part of the institution. All eight schools receive millions of dollars in research grants and other subsidies from federal and state government.

Origin of the name

The first recorded usage of the term “Ivy League” was by a sportswriter in 1933 and was a general reference to the older, and therefore “ivy covered,” schools in the Northeast. The Ivy League athletic association was formally established in 1954 and now comprises eight schools: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, and the University of Pennsylvania. While most of these schools are certainly capable of providing a good education, it’s what you do with your education that counts.

“ A proportion of our eastern ivy colleges are meeting little fellows another Saturday before plunging into the strife and the turmoil. ”
—Stanley Woodward (1895–1965), New York Tribune, October 14, 1933, describing the football season 

According to book Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins (1988), author William Morris writes that Stanley Woodward actually took the term from fellow New York Tribune sportswriter Caswell Adams. Morris writes that during the 1930s, the Fordham University football team was running roughshod over all its opponents. One day in the sports room at the Tribune, the merits of Fordham’s football team were being compared to those of Princeton and Columbia. Adams remarked disparagingly of the latter two, saying they were “only Ivy League.” Woodward, the sports editor of the Tribune, picked up the term and printed the next day.

Note though that in the above quote Woodward used the term ivy college, not ivy league as Adams is said to have used, so there is a discrepancy in this theory, although it seems certain the term ivy college and shortly later Ivy League acquired its name from the sports world.

Ivy League Sports

The first known instance of the term Ivy League being used appeared in the Christian Science Monitor on February 7, 1935 Several sports-writers and other journalists used the term shortly later to refer to the older colleges, those along the northeastern seaboard of the United States, chiefly the nine institutions with origins dating from the colonial era, together with the United States Military Academy (West Point), the United States Naval Academy, and a few others. These schools were known for their long-standing traditions in intercollegiate athletics, often being the first schools to participate in such activities. However, at this time, none of these institutions would make efforts to form an athletic league.

Ivy covering West College, Princeton UniversityThe Ivy League’s name derives from the ivy plants, symbolic of their age, that cover many of these institutions’ historic buildings. The Ivy League universities are also called the “Ancient Eight” or simply the Ivies.

A common folk etymology attributes the name to the Roman numerals for four (IV), asserting that there was such a sports league originally with four members. The Morris Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins helped to perpetuate this belief. The supposed “IV League” was formed over a century ago and consisted of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and a 4th school that varies depending on who is telling the story.

However, representatives from four schools, Rutgers, Princeton, Yale and Columbia met at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in Manhattan on October 19, 1873 to establish a set of rules governing their intercollegiate athletic competition, and particularly to codify the new game of college football (which at the time, largely resembled what is currently called rugby).Though invited, Harvard chose not to attend. While no formal organization or conference was established, the results of this meeting governed athletic events between these schools well into the twentieth century.

Undergraduate enrollments among the Ivy League schools range from about 4,000 to 14,000, making them larger than those of a typical private liberal arts college and smaller than a typical public state university. Ivy League university financial endowments range from Brown’s $2.01 billion to Harvard’s $28.8 billion, the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world.

Many Ivy League schools are primarily graduate schools
Large research universities are great places to be a graduate student, and sometimes not-so-great places to be an undergraduate. Alton O. Roberts, a retired professor and an Ivy League grad himself, and formerly principal investigator for a national study of undergraduate instruction when he was with the Center for the Improvement of Instruction at Syracuse University, reports “The undergraduate at these schools is pretty much there to keep the streets paved. The money doesn’t go toward the undergraduate budget. A student will face large classes, and teaching assistants instead of professors. The Ivy League degree is a brand, and there is the presumption of intelligence, the presumption of competence, but the undergraduate is not the important person at these schools.” One Ivy League school was recently excoriated in a national report because only 40 percent of its classes are taught by tenure-track faculty; the rest are taught by an ad hoc collection of instructors, graduate students, and adjuncts.

Rankings of specific departments often don’t favor the Ivy League
Who has the top academic departments in the United States? The most commonly cited ranking system in the United States has been totally debunked, so we won’t be quoting that one here. The National Research Council rankings are considered the gold standard, but they are at this time badly out of date. Although not without its critics, The Faculty Scholarly Productivity Index is generally accepted as a legitimate ranking system by scholars nationwide. The Ivy League shows up with some number-one rankings, but so do Penn State (anthropology), Indiana U. (French), NYU (mathematics), Washington U. in St. Louis (political science), and so on. The outdated NRC data has similar surprises when objective measures of quality are employed.

The Ivy League Colleges