Ivy League

The Ivy League is an athletic conference composed of sports teams from eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States. The conference name is also commonly used to refer to those eight schools as a group. The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University. The term Ivy League also has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism.

The term became official after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference in 1954. The use of the phrase is no longer limited to athletics, and now represents an educational philosophy inherent to the nation's oldest schools. Seven of the eight schools were founded during the United States 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.

Ivy League schools are viewed as some of the most prestigious, and are ranked amongst the best universities in the United States and worldwide. All eight Ivy League institutions place within the top sixteen of the U.S. News & World Report college and university rankings, including the top four schools and five of the top nine. A member of the Ivy League has been the U.S. News number-one-ranked university in each of the past twelve years: Princeton University five times, Harvard University twice, and the two schools tied for first five times.

The Ivies are all in the Northeast geographic region of the United States. Each school receives millions of dollars in research grants and other subsidies from federal and state government.

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. Overall enrollments range from approximately 6,100 in the case of Dartmouth to over 20,000 in the case of Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and Penn. Ivy League university financial endowments range from Brown's $2.2 billion to Harvard's $32 billion, the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world.