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 most commonly used to refer to those eight schools considered as a group. The term has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and a reputation for social elitism.

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."

All of the Ivy 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 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" or "contract" colleges, that are an integral part of the institution.

Undergraduate enrollments among the Ivy League schools range from about four to fourteen thousand, 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 $2.3 billion, the 24th-largest endowment of any U.S. college or university, to Harvard's $29.2 billion, the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world.