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 also 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 the whole 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."

All of the Ivy League institutions share some general characteristics: they consistently place within the top twenty 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.

Named after the ivy plants that traditionally cover their historic buildings, the term Ivy League was first coined informally to refer to these institutions of higher education which compete in both scholastics and sports. Formally, it also refers to the association of these schools in NCAA Division I athletic competition. The Ivy League universities are often simply called the Ivies or, affectionately, the Ancient Eight.

Some attribute 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.

Seven of the Ivy League schools are older than the American Revolution; Cornell was founded just after the American Civil War. These seven provided the overwhelming majority of the higher education in the Northern and Middle Colonies; their early faculties and founding boards were largely, therefore, drawn from other Ivy League institutions; there were also some British graduates - more from the University of Cambridge than Oxford, but also from the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere. The founders of Rutgers, in 1766, were largely Ivy; and so for many of the colleges formed after the Revolution.

Most of these seven schools were more or less Congregationalist or Presbyterian in denomination; Anglican King's College broke up in the Revolution, and was reformed as public non-sectarian Columbia College. In the early nineteenth century, the specific purpose of training Calvinist ministers was handed off to theological seminaries; but a denominational tone, and such relics as compulsory chapel, often lasted well into the twentieth century. Cornell has always been strongly non-sectarian, partly as a reaction to this.

The OED first cites "Ivy League" from a sports-writer in 1933. It was then a vague term, referring to the long-established eastern schools, which had very strong athletic teams, sometimes national champions; they could afford elaborate training grounds and athletic scholarships. They did not, however, form an athletic league. These colleges then had a smaller, and much more homogeneous, student body than they now do: male, white, largely from wealthy families of pre-Revolutionary descent (and so often of British stock), largely Protestant.

"Ivy League" therefore also became, like WASP, a way of referring to this elite, and elitist, class. This sense dates back to at least 1935. Novels and memoirs attest this sense, as a social elite; to some degree independent of the actual schools.

After the Second World War, the present Ivy League institutions slowly widened their selection of students. They had always had distinguished faculties; some of the first Americans with doctorates had taught for them; but they now decided that they could not both be world-class research institutions and be competitive in the highest ranks of American college sport.

All Ivy League schools are known for their highly selective undergraduate programs, and acceptance rates now range from 8.6% for Yale to 24.7% for Cornell. These rates are far lower than they were up until the late 1990s. As late as 1992, acceptance rates ranged from 16% for Harvard to 47% for the University of Pennsylvania.

Although the Ivy League is usually regarded as a cohesive group from the outside, there is a considerable amount of internal academic rivalry and competition among its eight members. Among these elite universities, there is a heated competition for students. In 2002, admissions officers at Princeton logged into the Yale admissions website some fourteen times to view the admissions status of cross-applicants, using the names, birthdates, and social security numbers indicated on their Princeton applications; Princeton later asserted that it had been considering a similar system of early internet notification, and was surprised to find that Yale had used no password besides the Social Security number. Yale's administration notified the FBI about the actions after conducting its own investigation. Princeton moved one admissions official to a different department over the incident and the university's Dean of Admissions retired soon thereafter; as he had been scheduled to do.

Harvard: $25.5 billion endowment (as of 2005). This makes Harvard the wealthiest university in the world.
Yale: $15.2 billion (2005 value). This makes Yale the second-wealthiest in the world.
Princeton: $11.2 billion. This makes Princeton the fourth-wealthiest in the world.
Columbia: $5.2 billion
Cornell: $5.0 billion
Penn: $4.4 billion
Dartmouth: $2.7 billion
Brown: $1.8 billion.

Ivy champions are crowned in 33 men's and women's sports. In some sports, Ivy teams actually compete as members of another league, the Ivy championship being decided by isolating the members' records in play against each other. (For example, the six league members who participate in ice hockey do so as members of the ECAC Hockey League; but an Ivy champion is extrapolated each year.) Unlike all other Division I basketball conferences, the Ivy League has no tournament for the league title; the school with the best conference record represents the conference in the Division I NCAA Basketball Tournament (with a playoff in the case of a tie).

On average, each Ivy school has more than 35 varsity teams. All eight are in the top 20 for number of sports offered for both men and women among Division I schools. In some sports, notably baseball and tennis, the Ivy League teams also frequently compete against Army and Navy.

Harvard and Yale are celebrated football and crew rivals. Princeton and Penn are fierce, storied men's basketball rivals whose encounters over the last half century spawned the infamous "Puck Fenn" and "Puck Frinceton" t-shirts at games. In only six instances in the last 51 years (from the 1955-56 season through the 2005-06 season) has neither Penn nor Princeton won at least a share of the Ivy League title in basketball, with Princeton champion or co-champion 25 times and Penn champion or co-champion 24 times. Penn has won 20 outright, Princeton 18 outright, and 4 out of the 7 times Princeton has been a co-champion (and all of the four times Penn has been a co-champion), the other champion was Penn or Princeton. Less storied rivalries exist between other Ivy league teams in other sports, including Cornell and Harvard in hockey (either team has won or shared the men's title each of the last 5 years), and Harvard and Penn in football (either Penn or Harvard has won the title since 2000, and both teams have traded undefeated seasons since 2001). In addition, no team other than Harvard and Princeton has won the men's swimming conference title since 1972, with Harvard winning the 34 year series 19-15 as of 2006. Unlike most Division I athletic conferences, the Ivy League prohibits the granting of athletic scholarships; all scholarships awarded are need-based (financial aid). Since there is no outright athletic scholarship program, the schools are typically less competitive in football and basketball, even when compared to universities with comparably rigorous academic standards.

In the time before recruiting for college sports became dominated by those offering athletic scholarships, the Ivy League was successful in many sports relative to other universities in the country. In particular, Princeton won 24 recognized national championships in college football, and Yale won 19. Both of these totals are considerably higher than those of other historically strong programs such as Notre Dame, which has won 12, and USC, which has won 10. Yale, whose coach Walter Camp was the "Father of American Football," held on to its place as the all-time wins leader in college football throughout the entire 20th century, but was finally passed by Michigan on November 10, 2001.

Although no longer as successful nationally as they once were in many of the more popular college sports, the Ivy League is still competitive in others. One such example is rowing. All of the Ivies have historically been among the top crews in the nation, and most continue to be so today. (Other historical top crews include Cal, Washington, Wisconsin and Navy). Most recently, on the men's side, Harvard won the Intercollegiate Rowing Association Championships the last three years in a row (2003, 2004, 2005), and on the women's side, Harvard and Brown won the 2003 and 2004 NCAA Rowing Championships, respectively. The Ivy League schools are also very competitive in both men's and women's hockey.

The Ivy League is home to some of the oldest college rugby teams, including the University of Pennsylvania team. These teams meet annually to compete in a tourney. The 2006 Ivy League Tournament was hosted by Yale, and the 2005 tournament was hosted by the University of Pennsylvania.