IVY LEAGUE: MUCH MORE THAN A SPORTS CONFERENCE, THESE ARE AMONGST THE WORLD&#8217;S BEST COLLEGES

Columbia University

Established in 1754 as King’s College by Royal Charter issued by King George II, Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, research-intensive university offering degree programs from undergraduate to post-doctoral level. Located in uptown Manhattan’s Morningside Heights, Columbia is an academic powerhouse with a global renown. As the oldest institution of higher learning in New York State and the fifth oldest in the United States, Columbia’s story is deeply intertwined with the birth of the nation – originally located in a small schoolhouse in lower Manhattan, its purpose was to train the future leaders of the British colonies but instead produced many of the revolutionary heroes of American independence with alumni including Founding Fathers: Alexander Hamilton, John Jay and Gouverneur Morris. Maintaining its tradition as an educator of American leaders, the college counts three former Presidents amongst its alumnus and another as a former President of the University. The university changed its name to Columbia College following the War of Independence and to reflect its patriotism to the republic and moved to its uptown location in 1897.

Whilst sometimes overshadowed by its Ivy League peers in the Big Three, Harvard, Princeton and Yale, Columbia is one of the most highly selective and academically challenging universities in the world with an international reputation. Undergraduates at Columbia College are required to undertake the university’s famous Core Curriculum¹³ which mandates a series of classes and compulsory reading for all Columbian students so that they may graduate with a broad intellectual education that focuses on holistic development of mind, body and character. The university’s various graduate schools are celebrated for their high research output which has profoundly advanced human knowledge and understanding.

As an ancient university, Columbia is known for its many unique traditions and customs. The university is an integral part of the history of old New York city and, alongside its sister school Barnard College, has played a seminal role in producing city, state and national leaders across politics, law, business and the arts.

The school has also played a significant role in the development of American sport, including the country’s favourite pastime of gridiron football. The Columbia Lions, alongside their Ivy League peers and rivals (such as Rutgers University), was one of the pioneers of the American football code. Indeed, Columbia played in one of the first intercollegiate football games in history against Rutgers in 1870. The Columbia Lions recorded a major sporting upset at the 1934 Rose Bowl, defeating Stanford 7-0. Columbia enjoys a fierce rivalry with Cornell (against whom they compete for the Empire State Bowl) and, to a lesser extent, Fordham University, New York University, Rutgers, Penn and Princeton.

Columbia is an extremely selective school with an acceptance rate of around 4% of all applicants (and bear in mind that applicants are typically only the highest achievers). Columbia applicants have an average GPA of 4.18 and will be expected to have excelled in at least one major sport and have achieved a high standard in additional extracurricular pursuits, particularly music. The alumni list includes a glittering roster of distinguished Columbians, including royals, leaders of nations, celebrated personalities, and business tycoons.

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Cornell University

Cornell is often remarked upon as being the most unusual of the Ivy League colleges, owing to its later foundation and its curious public-private status as a college in receipt of significant state funding through New York’s state university system. Nonetheless, Cornell, known as Big Red was an athletic powerhouse throughout the early part of the last century and regularly scheduled games against the other Ivy League schools. The school garnered an early reputation as an academic luminary and, from its outset, was a rival to those big schools with a greater heritage. The school was founded in Ithaca, New York in 1865 by wealthy benefactor and industrialist, Ezra Cornell, himself of limited schooling, along with Andrew Dixon White. He set about establishing an egalitarian institution, non-sectarian and co-educational in ethos, a revolutionary counterpart to the existing schools. Cornell stated, as his foundational mission that he: “would found an institution where any person can find instruction in any study.” An idea that has come to be known as the “Any Person” ethos. This was in stark contrast to the established neoclassical preference precedent where most American universities were for wealthy, white, Christian men studying the classics. Cornell and White wanted the university to be research-oriented but also fostering civic engagement and enhancing social and economic mobility. Furthermore, Cornell would cement this endeavour with stipulations that the school provide practical technical and scientific instruction in addition to the classics. Thus, Cornell would fast become renowned for its agricultural and engineering programs. Developing upon the “Any Person” concept, Cornell also embraces the “Any Study” approach, allowing the university to develop world-class facilities and research output in any area of study, hence the university is home to one of the world’s highest-rated hotel schools – an unusual feature of a leading private research university.

Thus, with the passing of the Morrill Land-Grant Acts¹⁴, Cornell’s unique expertise and faculty would attract significant funding under the New York State legislature’s land-grant program. Operating partially under the State University of New York system in respect of those constituent schools and programs that are in receipt of state funds, the school attracts both private and public applicants, making it the most socio-economically diverse Ivy. It is also why the school has been referred to as “the first truly American university” (a quote regularly attributed to the university but first coined by Frederick Rudolph in 1962)¹⁵ ¹⁶ ¹⁷ ¹⁸.

Owing to its later foundation and rejection of the neoclassical appetites of the established universities, Cornell has a beaux-arts campus, sprawling across the gorges of its upstate New York location. The beauty of its site often resulting in complaints about the hilly landscape and the regular climbs faced by students and faculty alike. Indeed, it was a Cornellian who coined the local slogan “Ithaca is gorges!” a pun referencing the region’s gorgeous geography¹⁹.

Like its Ivy League peers, Cornell has several unique traditions and superstitions which play a small role in college life. Cornell also boasts a vibrant Greek life scene, at odds with its peer schools who have made efforts to end Hellenic chapters on their respective campuses.

Cornell shares close relations with many universities and colleges across the USA and internationally, particularly through its Global Hubs Network and its International Exchange partners. Whilst Cornell has always been a co-educational school, it once maintained a sister school relationship Wells College and even, at one point, sought to take it over. Students were able to cross-matriculate in certain subjects before Wells closed and, ultimately, its legacy folded into Hobart and William Smith Colleges²⁰.

Athletics have played a big role in the history of Cornell and, as compared to other Ivy leagues, are a much more significant aspect of campus life. Big Red played a huge role in the early development of American sports and the governing structures and codes of intercollegiate competition. Cornell dominates in ice hockey and wrestling but has strong basketball, football and rowing legacies too. Cornell enjoys an historic rivalry with the other Ivy League schools, particularly Harvard, Penn and Dartmouth. Cornell also has an historic rivalry with Syracuse University that became so fierce that all sporting competition was suspended for a time and, as the rumour goes, may even have resulted in Syracuse’s potential candidacy for admission to the Ivy League being vetoed.

Cornell is highly selective with an acceptance rate of 8% and the average GPA of successful applicants being around 4.18. Whilst Cornell’s acceptance rate is certainly higher than the other Ivies, admitted students likely have a GPA on par with the most selective schools in the nation. Cornell’s may have a reputation as being the easiest Ivy to get into is but is often regarded as one of the hardest to stay in due to the rigour and vigour of its academic program. As with their peer schools, applicants to Cornell will be expected to have a significantly broad range of extracurricular interests and activities, with a high degree of accomplishment therein.

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Dartmouth College

Dartmouth College, nestled in the scenic Upper Valley of New Hampshire, is known as “Big Green”, owing to its beautiful, leafy, upstate location. As the northernmost Ivy, and the least urban, Dartmouth balances a rugged, outdoorsy spirit with some of the most rigorous undergraduate teaching in the world. A full research university, Dartmouth’s refusal to change its’ name to reflect its output is a firm nod to its past and to its emphasis on its undergraduate liberal arts program. Many prospective students and, even, faculty, are drawn to the school due to its easy vibe, much more akin to the so-called Little Ivies than it is to its Ivy League rivals.

Dartmouth was founded in 1769 by the Reverend Eleazar Wheelock. It is amongst the oldest higher education institutions in North America, the ninth oldest in the United States and one of only a handful established before the American Revolution (the nine Colonial Colleges). Initially, the college began as a religious mission school, the successor to Moor’s Indian Charity School, intended to educate native American children in the ways of Western culture and Christianity (explicitly in the Congregationalist tradition). The school, well-endowed for its charitable purpose but struggling to attract pupils due to its location in Lebanon, faced a perilous fate. Wheelock determined that relocating to Hanover would be of great strategic benefit and sought to establish a new school using the original charitable endowment but focused moreover on the education of the Congregationalist colonial community. He petitioned for a charter from King George III and named his new school for his early benefactor, the Earl of Dartmouth. However, whilst Dartmouth was intended to replicate Wheelock’s earlier work, he was clear in that he sought to move away from the former school’s particular charitable purpose and focus on the provision of instruction to the children of European colonists in the ways of the Congregationalist faith, much to its’ namesake benefactor’s chagrin. Native American children were accepted into the school but with much less representation. To facilitate the growth of both school and community, Wheelock recognised that he would need to prepare young men for missionary work and for Ministry, thus Dartmouth would also become a seminary. In its new rendition, Dartmouth would receive its first significant donation from John Phillips, a major donor to Harvard and Princeton and who would later found Phillips Exeter Academy (and whose nephew founded Phillips Academy Andover).

The college faced substantial turmoil in 1819 when the State of New Hampshire initiated a takeover of the school and established Dartmouth University, a public university, on the Hanover campus. Dartmouth College refused to comply and relocated as a going concern to nearby facilities. At the instigation of a Dartmouth alumnus, the college successfully defended its position and had the State’s efforts overthrown in what has come to be known as the Dartmouth College Case (also known as the Small College Case, in reference to which the defendant’s advocate, Daniel Webster, stated: “it is sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it.” The saying has become gospel to the Dartmouth community despite that it may not, in fact, be accurate²¹)²². The case is oft quoted as established precedent in matters of contractual law with respect to the protection of private interests in matters of state overreach.

Dartmouth’s relative isolation has often been derided by rival Ivy students, however its location is also the source of its great strength and sense of community. Decidedly rural, the school embraces the surrounding wilderness with outdoor pursuits being a core part of student life. Indeed, Dartmouth’s motto Vox clamantis in deserto translates, roughly, to “a voice calling out in the wilderness”. The on-campus Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) is the oldest adventure-oriented club in the nation and nearly all Dartmouth undergrads will be familiar with DOC cabins, retreats and excursions. The cold New England winters can make for long nights and hardship for campus residents, but this has also resulted in Dartmouth’s great traditions and high-energy celebrations which puncture the harshness of the snowy wintertide and which add to the fun and festivities the school has become known for.

Dartmouth’s insularity fosters a great sense of community and camaraderie, which has given it something of a reputation as a party school (certainly relative to its Ivy peers, perhaps, with the exception of Penn). Famously, the school served as the inspiration for Faber College, the fictional institution in National Lampoon’s Animal House (albeit this comedy was filmed on location at the University of Oregon). One of the movie’s co-writers, Chris Miller, is a Big Green alum, graduating from his alma mater in 1963²³.

This reputation, however, belies the truth of the Dartmouth experience. Dartmouth is an extremely rigorous school, requiring students to excel academically and contribute to the body of research material that the school is famous for publishing. As with similar colleges, Dartmouth has developed its proprietary curriculum known as the D-Plan, which operates on a unique, year-round “quarter system” consisting of four 10-week terms. Under the D-Plan, students have a wide range of choices and great flexibility to take “off-terms” for international internships, overseas study, or research projects whilst remaining on campus during the beautiful New Hampshire summers (the legendary “Sophomore Summer”).

Dartmouth has a proud athletic history too, with the Big Green often performing at a level greater than the relatively small size of the student body when contrasted with their Ivy counterparts. Dartmouth is a dominant force in winter sports, field games and outdoor pursuits. The school also has a particular pedigree in track and field and football, having won more Ivy championships than any other school in the League. Dartmouth’s early role in the formation of the Triangular Football League (being a member of the forerunner Northern League) shaped the development of intercollegiate competition in the United States, and not just in terms of gridiron football. Dartmouth’s historic football rival is Harvard, although rivalries against Amherst, MIT, and Trinity College shaped much of Big Green’s early football era. In hockey, Princeton is arguably Dartmouth’s biggest rival. Yet, today, Cornell is often billed as Dartmouth’s primary rival due to their geographic proximity within the Ivy League. Dartmouth also enjoys something of a sister relationship with Mount Holyoke, one of the Seven Sisters schools. Dartmouth maintains close relations with other prestigious New England private colleges through the 12 College Exchange Program.

Dartmouth is highly-selective, accepting approximately 5% of applicants (similar to the Ivy average), the average GPA of whom tends to be around the 3.90 – 4.00 mark. Applicants are expected to have broad extracurricular interests and achievements to support their candidacy and to contribute to the Dartmouth community during their time in Hanover. Dartmouth’s smaller size, rural location and undergraduate liberal arts focus mean the school often competes more closely with NESCAC schools and other small liberal arts colleges. Whilst Dartmouth has many graduate schools and institutions and is classified as “R1: Doctoral University (Very High Research Activity)” under the Carnegie Classification, its research output is significantly less than peer schools, which often sees the school ranked below its’ Ivy rivals in national and international rankings.

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Harvard University

The oldest institution of higher education in the United States, and, undoubtedly, its most famous, Harvard is a globally renowned, highly selective and extremely prestigious private research university. Such is Harvard’s reputation; it is perhaps the most famous university in the world alongside its Oxbridge peers. The college was founded in 1636 as the New(e) College, only 15 years after the establishment of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, making it one of the world’s oldest universities. In 1639 the institution would be renamed for John Harvard, a Puritan minister from England and Cambridge graduate who was one of the colony’s early settlers and a founder of the University. Harvard died of tuberculosis in 1638 at the age of 30 and had bequeathed his entire library and a significant portion of his estate to the fledgling college. The college took up residence in the heart of the recently established colonial outpost village of Newe Town (the first properties of this settlement having only been built in 1631 and upriver from Boston Harbor and the town of Boston, founded in 1630). On the death of John Harvard and the renaming of the college in his honour, the residents of Newe Town elected in 1638 to rename their town Cambridge for the English university town where Harvard himself had studied. The original village site is the present Harvard Square. Many Harvardians refer to themselves as Cantabrigians, a Latin-derived term referencing Cambridge in England and which is applied to graduates of the University of Cambridge too.

Harvard College was never officially attached to any religious denomination; however, it was inevitably associated with the Puritan colony within which it was established and from whom most of its early students would come from. The college, as was the norm in the early modern period, did educate young men for the Congregationalist clergy to support their burgeoning community in this new world. The college became the archetype of the American education institution and the school to look up to for future establishments, including its closest rival, Yale, which was founded 65 years later.

With the expansion of the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the influx of Puritan pioneers from the European continent, Boston grew into a large city, reaching Cambridge and beyond. The influence of its earliest settlers, many of whom traced their lineage back to the Mayflower, would grow therewith. The early New England arrivals, escaping persecution and the established sectarian hierarchy of England, would ironically emulate the same in the New World. The so-called Brahmin cast of Congregationalist and Unitarian settlers would dominate the political and cultural landscape of the American northeast. They would welcome into their clubs the Episcopal and Methodists, affiliated with the church from which they once sought refuge, against successive waves of Catholic migration. Harvard would become forever associated with this social elite, being the preferred institution for their young men and reinforcing their social exclusivity. Harvard, for much of its history, would be regarded as a bastion of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant hegemony that defined America in their image. So too would the other elite colleges of the United States, many of which comprise the Ivy League today. This image would prevail at least until the 1960s when a new progressive movement would change the landscape of American academia and slowly result in the decline of the WASP elite, thus that today these universities are very much more representative of a diverse, intellectual, meritocratic, modern America, with a distinctly international outlook.

Harvard’s impact on modern America extends far beyond its academic and cultural relevance, its story is also the story of those great American sports, basketball, baseball and, above all, football. Whilst it is well-documented that the first intercollegiate football game in America took place between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869, it was the Harvard vs McGill game of 1874 that gave America its first taste of what would become the gridiron game. The Princeton vs Rutgers match closely resembled the association football (soccer) game popularised in England and across Europe and increasingly played on American college campuses in the late 19^th Century. However, a new variant had emerged amongst English public schools, first played at Rugby School, and popular on Canadian college campuses. McGill University introduced Harvard to their version of this sport when they agreed the rules for their first intercollegiate match in 1874 and so began the nation’s most popular sport. Harvard would play their biggest rival, Yale, the following year and create the greatest and oldest rivalry in American sports, now known simply as “The Game”. This rivalry would manifest in a host of other sports too, notably “The Boat Race”, modelled on the Oxbridge tradition. Harvard’s other great sporting rivals would include Princeton (with Harvard, Yale and Princeton comprising the Big Three, competing against one another in all manner of sporting and academic contest), and Dartmouth, with whom a long-standing football rivalry exists. Brown alleges a great rivalry with Harvard too; however, Harvard men may believe otherwise. In the early days of collegiate sport, when the great research universities of today were still, themselves, small male-only colleges, Harvard enjoyed regular fixtures in sports and debate against the likes of Amherst, Trinity, Tufts University, Wesleyan University, Williams College, and the Service Academies (the United States Military Academy “Army” and the United States Naval Academy “Navy”). Since the inception of the Ivy League, Harvard has also engaged in many fixtures against Colgate University and College of the Holy Cross, amongst others. Harvard once had a rivalry against Union College for admissions, which, at one point in time, was the third biggest college in the Thirteen Colonies, making a so-called Big Four with Harvard, Princeton and Yale. Harvard also enjoys rivalries with MIT (their Cambridge neighbour), Boston College, Boston University, and Tufts simply owing to their geographic proximity, academic excellence and competition for the brightest minds. Harvard enjoyed a sister relationship with Radcliffe College, one of the Seven Sisters, which was effectively co-located with and eventually merged into the university. To a lesser extent, Wellesley College was also associated with Harvard as a sister school of sorts.

Harvard once commanded a significant following, with a huge fanbase supporting their academic and athletic pursuits, however the decision of many of the elite colleges to eschew athletic scholarships, to not participate in bowl games, and the advent of televised college sports has seen much of that attention being diverted to major Division I Bowl Championship teams. Today, sports is a far less significant aspect of college life at Harvard and, indeed, its Ivy peers, despite that the university boasts the most extensive athletic program in the country.

The decline in relevance of collegiate sports may be a driver in the decline of school spirit and the bonds that underpin campus community²⁴ ²⁵. So it is that Harvard, once celebrated for its tight knit community, palpable immediately on passing the black iron gates into Harvard Yard, is sometimes derided as soulless²⁶, compounded by Cambridge’s gradual absorption into the expanding Boston city centre and the ever-present commotion caused by curious tourists.

Nonetheless, Harvard retains a rich history of traditions and quirks unique to its ancient campus, including a thriving secret society scene that has existed for well over a century and counts many distinguished luminaries amongst its membership. An academic powerhouse, Harvard is a research-intensive university publishing academic output at a level way beyond many of their closest peers. Harvard regularly ranks amongst the top five universities in the world, often vying for first place in the best recognised rankings. The university is a pillar of American intellectualism, borne of its driving mission: to bring the world’s brightest minds into a single square mile on the premise that this inevitably will lead to progress, a concept known as the “Yard” idea. Harvard also challenges students to focus on real-world problem-solving over rote memorisation, creating capable intellectuals with an applied understanding of their learning. The university also maintains the largest academic library in the world.

Harvard is extremely selective, attracting the best applicants from across the world. Admissions are on a need-blind basis and only 4% of candidates are accepted. It is the most selective of the Ivy League with accepted students maintaining an average GPA of 4.20. Harvard boasts an enviable alumni list, which includes 8 US Presidents and a host of international royals, business leaders, statesmen, diplomats, and first-in-class academics. Bizarrely, Harvard students are recognised as being of such a high calibre that even their college dropouts (including Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg) are often far more successful than graduates of other universities. Harvard has produced more American Presidents, more Nobel laureates and more Rhodes Scholars than any other university.

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Princeton University

One of the nation’s oldest and most prestigious research universities, Princeton was founded as the College of New Jersey in 1746 in Elizabeth. The college’s storied history began with a Presbyterian seminary in Pennsylvania that had come to be known as the “Log College”²⁷ and the Great Awakenings that would redefine American Presbyterianism and, indeed, Protestantism more generally. The established Synod of Philadelphia was the first Presbyterian judicatory in the American colonies and tended to favour a conservative interpretation of the faith – the so-called Old Light and hailing from the British tradition. The Synod’s preference for ordained Ministers was young men who had graduated from British universities or, reluctantly, Harvard and Yale as America’s only higher education colleges of note. New Light Presbyterians, proponents of the First Great Awakening, professed a different interpretation of their faith and the Log College would serve as a seminary preparing future ordained ministers for their community. The Synod would explicitly ban graduates of the Log College from becoming Ministers in the established church and so it would be that a group of New Light Presbyterians affiliated with the Log College would embark on the path towards obtaining a charter to establish a college of their own to rival Harvard and Yale and in keeping with the rules of the Old Light-leaning Synod²⁸. The College of New Jersey was granted a charter in 1746, relocating from Elizabeth to Newark in 1747 and, finally, to Princeton in 1756 for which the school was renamed in 1896 (although the college was referred to as, simply, Princeton for many years prior to the formal name change).

Princeton is the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States, behind its biggest rivals, Harvard and Yale, and the College of William & Mary founded in 1693 in Williamsburg (Penn was founded earlier than Princeton but received its charter later). The college’s early history was marred in controversy; the very foundation of the school was opposed by the Anglican (later Episcopal) hegemony that had come to dominate the thirteen colonies, arguing that the college’s first charter was invalid²⁹. A second charter was later awarded, modelled on that of its two big rivals in the Northeast. The prominent founding families of the mid-Atlantic and New England states would elect to send their children to Harvard or Yale and, later, Union College and Columbia in preference to Princeton. However, many of the wealthy, early families and plantationists of the southern States would opt for Princeton over the other colonial colleges due to its relative geographic proximity. Princeton’s relationship with Patrician Southern families would result in the school earning the nickname: the “Southern Ivy”⁶ and conferring a degree of social prestige on the college. Nonetheless, it wouldn’t be until the late 1860s that Princeton would cement its status as a pillar of the American establishment and a darling of the upper classes. This was the era in which James McCosh served as the college’s President and ushered in a series of changes and upgrades to the ancient institution³¹. He expanded the campus, oversaw the introduction of the famous eating clubs (at the expense of fraternities and sororities which were ended under his tenure), allowed the development of various extracurricular clubs (including the colleges’ first football club), and conferred the first doctorates on select Princeton graduates. Princeton had arrived and would become the preferred destination for the well-heeled children of New Jersey and Pennsylvania (and becoming cherished by the Mainliners of western Philadelphia and its surrounds).

This era marked the augmentation of the status of the Big Three, Harvard, Yale, and Princeton: now the dominant forces in American education. By the 1880s, certainly, these schools recognised one another as peer schools and were competing against one another as they began to transform into academic powerhouses, full research universities with various graduate schools and research institutions, leaving behind their relatively small college status. They also began to compete against one another in sports, with the Big Three informally regularising their games through a triangular football league of sorts in that decade, with the Princeton Tigers proving themselves to be the team to beat, especially with respect to their basketball and lacrosse programs.

In fact, the very first organised game of intercollegiate football in 1869 saw a Princeton team take on nearby rival, Rutgers (at that time, also a small, private, men’s college with whom a merger was once proposed³²). A fierce rivalry existed between these two schools, a rivalry that still presents occasionally but has largely dissipated since the New Jersey State Legislature designated Rutgers as the state university in 1945. Princeton’s primary rivals today are Penn (its nearest Ivy rival), Harvard, Yale, and Columbia. Princeton, historically, shared something of an unofficial sister school relationship with Bryn Mawr College of the Seven Sisters, although, for a brief period, Evelyn College was its sister school proper.

College life at Princeton is defined by an intensely rigorous academic culture. The school sets extremely high standards for its students with a heavy focus on academic output from undergraduates. Princeton has eschewed expansion through various graduate schools as is typical of large research universities, in favour of its primary undergraduate mission. The Senior Thesis is a serious undertaking, akin to postgraduate-level theses in other universities. Princeton graduates are, consequently, highly acclaimed for their abilities and capacity to thrive under pressure.

Life on campus isn’t all work and no play, however. Occupying a rural location (less than fifty miles from New York City and from Philadelphia), Princeton has an insular community which has fostered some unique traditions and occasions. The historic influence of quasi-Aristocratic Southern dynastic families had a profound role in shaping Princetonian culture, decidedly more preppy than many of its Ivy peers. The intensive academics, power sports and isolated campus, coupled with a sense of gentility resulted in a legendary drinking culture at Princeton. Princeton drinking jackets (also known as beer jackets and occasionally listed on eBay or other auction sites), are a regular feature in graduate ceremonies (with each graduating class commissioning a unique version for themselves). These were originally worn to protect one’s attire from spilled beer at the raucous butteries on campus and at the various eating clubs (eating clubs are exclusive social clubs that are the epicentre of life at Princeton, and which have served to replace the fraternities that were abolished in the late-1800s). The eating clubs, on the surface, present a further sense of refinement at “Tigerland” – a civilised tradition evidencing the undoubted good breeding of the student body yet, as with the beer jackets, what’s behind the façade is often libertine and indulgent. Of course, as a modern and diverse university, the eating clubs have become far less prevalent in the lives of Princeton students, and the university has been at the forefront of efforts to create a more inclusive and vibrant campus.

Princeton admits students on a need-blind basis, selecting only the brightest minds from across the world regardless of background. Only 5% of applicants are offered places and those admitted have an average GPA of 3.95 or higher, making the university one of the most selective in the entire world. Subsequently, Princeton regularly ranks in the top ten universities globally in the most prestigious rankings.

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University of Pennsylvania

The University of Pennsylvania (better known as Penn) is one of the America’s pre-eminent institutions, a proud, private research university that has been serving the nation’s leaders since it was founded in 1740 by Benjamin Franklin. Franklin is one of the most famous figures in the early history of the Republic, a founding father, celebrated newspaper publisher and grand statesman who served as state president, Postmaster General and in various Ambassador roles. He was the first President of the University of Pennsylvania, subsequent to its foundation. Penn is the fourth oldest institution of higher learning in the United States; however, it did not receive its charter until 1755 when it first began instruction, thus both Princeton and Columbia are often regarded as being older.

Penn traces its origins back to the development of a lecture hall, built in 1740 to allow for visiting preachers to meet with, speak to and provide instruction to the evangelical Anglican community of Philadelphia. It was the largest building in the city and so began the University of Pennsylvania. In 1749, Franklin began petitioning for a public academy to educate the young men of the city with a somewhat radical focus on sciences in the academy tradition, contrary to the classics and rote learning standard that had been adopted at other schools. The College of Philadelphia received its charter in 1755 and began tutoring on the site of the great hall in that same year, with undergraduate courses from the outset. Unlike many of Penn’s peers, the school did not prepare young men for missionary or ministry work, having no seminary department. The college, despite its Anglican (Episcopal) origins, has been, officially, non-sectarian from the date of its establishment.

Philadelphia was the epicentre of the American Republican movement, serving as the meeting place for the nation’s Founding Fathers and, ultimately, being designated as the nation’s first capital after the American Revolution and War of Independence. A city founded by Quakers, Philadelphia had become known for its progressive ethos and values, radical to the conservative orthodoxy of the time. This spirit would be reflected in the mission of Penn with most the school’s early students coming from the Friends tradition. Indeed, the school’s athletic teams are known as the Quakers and the school collaborates closely with neighbouring institutions that are explicitly Quaker through the Quaker Consortium (including its unofficial sister school, Bryn Mawr).

The progressive spirit has defined much of Penn’s history: it was one of the first universities in the New World to develop on-site dormitories in 1765; received its first native American students in 1755; founded the first graduate medical school in the country, also in 1765; graduated its first Jewish student, Moses Levy, in 1772; opened the first teaching hospital in 1874; and the first graduate business school, Wharton School, in 1881. Penn has been at the vanguard of developments in higher education since day one – a testament to Franklin’s pioneering ambition and want for a learned community, a university that has only ever sought to elevate standards, advocating for scientific and technical understanding, and leading the way in professional education. All fundamentally driven by Franklin’s pursuit of “useful knowledge” as the means to advancing society³³.

Penn’s role in the future of the American Republic cannot be understated; note least the efforts of Franklin and his friends and followers, but also how they helped shaped a community of scholars sympathetic to their revolutionary zeal. Eight of the nation’s Founding Fathers were associated with Penn, including faculty and students, seven of whose names were signed to the Declaration of Independence. Penn also boasts an alumni list of old Pennsylvanians that includes two United States Presidents, three United States Supreme Court Justices and four who occupied corresponding offices in other nations, and numerous senior politicians and statesmen across the world. Furthermore, Penn has instructed and prepared many famous names in the worlds of business and industry, journalism, the arts, military service, government and diplomatic, science and technology.

Befitting of its ancient lineage, Penn life is beset with traditions and customs unique to the university, the most famous of which is the tradition of “toast throwing”, when toasted bread is thrown at the end of the third quarter of home football games (a play on raising a toast with a drink). Many tourists and visitors attend Penn games simply to observe or partake in this curious activity. Penn also celebrates an annual “Ivy Day” with the placing of an ivy stone on campus³⁴ (a class stone), a practice unique to a select few historic, northeastern colleges and universities and often posited as a contributing factor to the Ivy League nomenclature and etymology.

Penn also enjoys an active Greek life community, unique amongst the Ivies (only Cornell has a larger network of fraternities and sororities), which have been on campus since the 1800s. Fraternities on campus provided many of the earliest boarding houses for incoming students and have continued to play an important role in college life. Penn’s rigorous academic program combined with a thriving Greek life and tradition rich culture has earned the university as a “work hard, play hard” institution. It is often regarded, unfairly, as the party school of the Ivies³⁵.

School spirit at Penn is underpinned by a strong athletic program in which Penn has been a dominant force in intercollegiate football, especially in the early days of varsity sport, and basketball. Franklin Field is the oldest football stadium in the United States and the site of the very first broadcast game. Penn’s basketball stadium, The Palestra, is known as the “Cathedral of College Basketball”³⁶ owing to its status as host to more NCAA-sanctioned basketball games than any other facility in the country. Penn’s biggest rival is Princeton, with basketball matches being particularly hotly contested. Penn also has historic, though less significant, rivalries with The Pennsylvania State University, the University of Pittsburgh, Drexel University and the other Philadelphia Big 5 (LaSalle University, Saint Joseph’s University, Temple University, and Villanova University).

A veritable blue-blooded institution, Penn regularly features amongst the highest ranked universities in the world in respected national and international rankings. The constituent graduate schools and research institutes of the university are often recorded as the best in the world and the universities’ research output is highly acclaimed. As such, Penn is an extremely selective university: approximately 5% of applicants are accepted and those students typically have a GPA of 3.91 or above, in addition to a suite of extracurricular interests and achievements. Penn students come from across the world.

Read more here.

Yale University

A grand old institution, Yale is the Ivy prototype, the most “Gothic” of the Ivies with genre-defining curricula, a residential college system and the greatest impact on Greek life and collegiate secret societies in America. Yale’s beautiful campus is punctuated with towering stone spires, hidden courtyards, covert crypts, and gothic halls in which all undergraduates are required to reside. Yale offers a unique blend of ancient tradition and cutting-edge creative energy.

Founded as the Collegiate School in 1701, Yale was initially based in Saybrook where it was established by a collective of Congregationalist ministers who set about developing an institution that would facilitate and support their growing community. It is the third oldest institution of higher education in the United States and amongst the oldest in the world. Yale is one of nine colleges that were founded prior to the Declaration of Independence.

The school relocated to New Haven in 1716 and was endowed with a substantial donation from Elihu Yale, a Welsh merchant and governor of the East India Company. The college was renamed in Yale’s honour, despite that its namesake never visited the college. Even though the university bears Yale’s name and Yale students are often referred to as Elis, it was a later benefactor, Edward Harkness, whose legacy has had the most profound impact on Yale and whose name is, perhaps, most well-known amongst Yalies.

Harkness was one of the wealthiest men in America, an heir to a great oil fortune. A graduate of St. Paul’s School and Yale (so common a pathway that some detractors alleged the two institutions shared an unofficial admissions relationship)³⁷. Upon inheriting his father’s, and later his brother’s, vast fortune he became a serial philanthropist, giving substantial funds to various organisations and institutions across America. He gave generously to his former boarding school and to their great rival, Phillips Exeter Academy. He donated handsomely to the University of St Andrews in Scotland and, most famously, he made significant gifts to Yale and to Harvard with the proviso that these funds be used in the creation of a residential college system modelled on the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (and St Andrews for that matter). Harkness’s contribution would allow both universities to finance a significant expansion, embracing the collegiate gothic architecture so prominently associated with the Ivy League. In honour of his brother, Harkness Tower, the most prominent structure on campus, was so named. It is also for Edward Harkness that the globally recognised teaching methodology, the Harkness Table / Harkness Method³⁸ is named, devised at Exeter following his magnanimous bequest.

Yale also found backers and supporters from unexpected places, including several senior figures associated with their biggest rival, Harvard. Students and senior faculty, including Increase Mather, sixth President of Harvard, were finding themselves increasingly at odds with the broader trend towards liberalism in the practice of faith and study in Cambridge. In opposition to this direction, they put their efforts into championing Yale in the hopes that the newer school would become a pillar of conservative Protestantism. Increase Mather’s son, Cotton Mather, was the man who encourage Elihu Yale’s altruism.

Nonetheless, Yale’s history has been defined rather by its radicalism and progressivism as much as by its conservatism. The university has been heavily associated with the American Enlightenment movement and, at various points, liberalist theology and politics, being a hotbed of student activism, often compared to its British counterpart, the University of Cambridge. Like Cambridge, Yale also has strong connections to the establishment, being a preferred school for the elite and ruling classes and a recruitment ground for the state, most famously the intelligence apparatus and the various three letter agencies³⁹ ⁴⁰. Yale’s symbiotic relationship with intelligence services has been the plot to many conspiracy theories owing to the presence of secret societies on campus and the many alumni who have played senior roles in the operation of the American spy agencies and the surveillance state. Skull & Bones, the most secretive on-campus upperclassmen society is, ironically, legendary internationally.

Yale has a thriving secret society scene on campus, and the various organisations play a significant, although increasingly less prolific, role in student life. The oldest “landed” societies have their meeting places dotted about Yale’s old campus: expansive, windowless tombs wherein meetings and initiation rituals are conducted in great secrecy and have seen many famous names pass their hallowed halls, including many US Presidents and world leaders. These societies have effectively replaced Yale’s once thriving Greek fraternity system.

College life at Yale is dominated by the residential college system wherein all incoming freshmen are assigned to a residential college at random. Their college will be where their home and social life will be centered and the source of much intramural competition. The close-knit collegiate communities’ foster bonds for life and are the cultural heart of the university, however, unlike the British universities that these are modelled after, the residential colleges at Yale do not have independent authority. Located in downtown New Haven, Yale also benefits from a bustling nightlife scene and one of New England’s most vibrant culinary hotspots. The university also has a reputation for being arty, contrasted with its Ivy peers, with a strong tradition of performing arts and the list of alumni who have distinguished themselves on stage and on screen is staggering.

Sports have played a substantial part in Yale’s history and status, with some of the oldest intercollegiate athletic programs in the nation. Yale’s bulldogs, so named for Handsome Dan, the first live university mascot in America (an English bulldog that lives on campus and comes from a continuous line of the same breed since 1889 – the current incarnation being Handsom Dan XIX), have been monumental in the development of the country’s favourite sport: football. The longest rivalry in the sport is “The Game” – an annual fixture between Harvard and Yale that predates the Ivy League. It was at Yale that Walter Camp (“The Father of Football”) cultivated the sport and set out various rules and practices that have shaped the American Football game as it is today. Yale’s stadium, the Yale Bowl, a neoclassical construction from 1914, set the standard for football stadia across the country and was the key inspiration for California’s famous Rose Bowl. Yale’s early participation in a triangular football schedule with Harvard and Princeton and membership of the various Eastern Intercollegiate sports leagues and conference put in motion the formation of the NCAA and American professional sports.

With such a storied past and pedigree, Yale is one of the most sought-after universities for aspiring students. It is, therefore, extremely selective with one of the lowest acceptance rates in the country at 4%. Furthermore, incoming Yalies are expected to maintain an average GPA of 4.17 in addition to a multitude of extracurricular interests and a demonstrable record of leadership and community involvement. The university has many of the world’s leading research institutes with a substantial volume of peer-reviewed academic output, making Yale, consistently one of the world’s highest ranked universities with a name known all over the globe.

Read more here.

All eight Ivies are, undoubtedly, well known globally for their academic excellence and their high selectivity. If you consider that only the very best and most capable pupils will apply to these schools, you will also recognise just how ultra-selective they are, with less than 10% (and in most cases 5% or less) of all applicants are accepted. Please note that acceptance rates and the Grade Point Averages (GPA) of accepted candidates may vary year to year. The figures below are the most accurate that we could determine at the time of writing (updated in 2026).

	Ranking						Acceptance rate	Average G.P.A.
	ARWU	CWUR	QS	THE	USN (WORLD)	USN (US)	Acceptance rate	Average G.P.A.
Brown	101-150	71	69	65	150	13	5%	4.18
Columbia	8	8	38	20	10	15	4%	4.18
Cornell	12	14	16	18	16	12	8%	4.18
Dartmouth	301-400	45	247	180	326	13	5%	3.90
Harvard	1	1	5	5	1	3	4%	4.20
Penn	14	7	15	14	15	7	5%	3.91
Princeton	7	6	25	3	16	1	5%	3.95
Yale	11	9	21	10	9	4	4%	4.17
National average							70.8%⁴¹	3.15*

The Ancient Eight colleges are also heavily represented amongst the best in the world in all the major rankings and studies including the Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) (AKA the Shanghai Ranking), the Center for World University Rankings (CWUR), the QS World University Rankings (QS) from Quacquarelli Symonds, the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (THE) and the U.S. News & World Report Best Global Universities (USN) rankings. Harvard, Yale and Princeton have consistently featured at the top of such rankings since ranking world universities first began. Of course, these rankings are often criticised due to the matrices that they use to assess universities, which can include graduate recruitment rates, peer-reviewed research output, academic qualifications of faculty and so forth. Such rankings typically favour only the largest universities that attract the highest levels of research funding and offer the greatest breadth of graduate schools. Therefore, smaller, undergraduate-focussed schools and colleges may be disfavoured in these rankings (which is certainly the case for Brown and Dartmouth – many of whose undergraduates may embark on Master’s programs at their larger Ivy rivals and thus boost the rankings of those universities at the expense of their alma mater).

Let us look more at the historical context which gave us the Ivy League and why these eight schools came to rise above the rest.

Background

Each of these universities, except for Cornell, were founded in the early days of the American colonies. They represent the various Protestant factions that had sought refuge in the New World, escaping persecution in Europe, pioneers building a new society in their image. The Virginia Colony, the first successful permanent colony established by the British, wasn’t even thirty years old when Harvard was founded in 1636, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in which it was founded was not even a decade old. A Puritan colony, Harvard’s early history in Massachusetts was dominated by the Congregationalist ideology and the community within which it was established.

It was nearly seventy years until Harvard’s closest rival was established. Yale was also founded with a congregationalist ethos when it opened in the Connecticut Colony. Over the course of the next century, nearly all the Ivy League schools would be founded. Cornell was established, later, in 1865. Only William & Mary and Rutgers claim a similar lineage to the oldest of the Ivies and these universities are collectively referred to as the Colonial Colleges. Over the century that followed, these schools would recognise one another as peers, the only institutions of note that competed to serve the emergent upper classes of American society⁴². Whilst many other colleges would follow in their footsteps (several of which have a lineage more ancient than some of the Ivies but were founded as high schools or female seminaries), few would enjoy the status and prestige achieved by their older peers. Of course, many of America’s older schools were founded to serve religious communities and maintained the classics tradition as their primary focus. Nonetheless, a select few colleges did rival the Ivies for prestige and reputation, and we shall explore those schools later.

This period in American history is intrinsically tied to the story of Protestantism and the First Great Awakening, with Christian evangelism and the trend towards deism profoundly guiding the mission and curricula of institutions of higher learning, especially those that performed a seminary function. Following the age of enlightenment and the age of scientific learning, successive waves of Protestant leaders were keen to find meaning in faith that would justify theological rationalisation for scientific and technological advancement. In essence, the great academies and colleges of the New World could satisfy their religious mission when providing instruction in natural science and emergent technology, useful to the industrialising economy.

Students flocked to these schools to access philosophical texts and ideas that were not easily available at a time of great religious and scientific zeal. The colleges were locked into an arms race to fill their libraries, and to attract the brightest minds and most learned professors to sate this burgeoning appetite. Religious communities were growing with migration from the European continent and the proselytising of the indigenous population, they needed ministers and missionaries, the political, social, and business elite needed educated managers, leaders, engineers and scientists to expand industry and governance.

The established colleges would cater as best they could to these competing and often opposed demands but doing so would often prove difficult with campus radicalism often threatening the viability of these establishments and causing tension within their surrounding communities. After all, these campuses were home to many educated young men, a long way from home and easily influenced by and susceptible to new ideas and movements. Successive administrations at schools and colleges across North America and across Europe were increasingly identifying a need to change how academic institutions were managed and the function that they performed.

Across the Atlantic, in the United Kingdom, a country which continued to play a significant cultural role on the early American nation even post-independence (despite being the opposing belligerent in the Revolutionary War) the British Public Schools and ancient universities were experiencing similar complexities. They were beginning to formalise their various sports and practices, codifying their student conduct expectations and developing broader, explicit curricula that would offer a more holistic education. Thomas Arnold’s time as head of Rugby School would be seminal in this transformation playing a huge part in the development of intramural and intercollegiate sports and the concept of muscular Christianity as a means for creating capable future leaders and harnessing the fervour and enthusiasm of young men in a community positive way.

A core element of this movement was organised sport. Rowing had been the dominant campus sport for decades, the first intercollegiate sporting contest in North America was the Harvard-Yale Regatta, contested in 1852 and better known as “The Race”, held annually since 1859. However, this noble sport was displaced in the later part of the century with the most popular sport of the early to mid 1800s being football, at that time a chaotic affair with countless variations, some quite violent. Football in the Americas was largely the same albeit more closely based on what would become the English game we now know as association football or soccer.

Students at many of the nation’s older colleges and schools had often played informal games adopting rules as and when appropriate or introduced by players. When the management of the schools and colleges embraced sport as a means of allowing the excesses of young men’s energy to be displaced, they began to organise games against varsity teams from their nearest rivals, and, soon after, travelled to play other schools too. The interaction between different communities began to result in a more homogenous set of standards and rules. The codification of association football in Great Britain would also heavily influence the prescribed form of play for intercollegiate football in North America during this time.

Whilst it is entirely possible, even likely, that games between teams convened from rival colleges had already happened, the first recorded match in the United States was a game that took place between Princeton and Rutgers in 1869. Rutgers beat Princeton by a score of 6 – 4⁴³. Both schools were relatively small, male-only, liberal arts focussed colleges who had already commenced a competitive rivalry academically and in basketball, amongst other engagements. The game was a success and the two colleges explored making the game a regular fixture (the two teams met regularly until 1978⁴⁴), inviting Harvard to participate. Harvard declined and the schools, allegedly, approached Penn.

Notwithstanding that heralded “First Game”, Princeton would play an erratic series of matches in the years thereafter, in part due to scheduling difficulties and finding commonality on rules of play. In the first effort to address these complications, representatives from Columbia, Princeton, Rutgers, and Yale met in October of 1873 to agree a stipulated set of twelve intercollegiate rules which would govern the college game and act as a reference for emergent programs at other schools⁴⁵. These rules were heavily influenced by the codified rules of the London Football Association, the forerunner to today’s game of soccer. Harvard declined an invitation to this conference and to agree to be bound by these rules as they had developed a rulebook of their own the year prior, which had borrowed aspects of the rugby variant. In this endeavour, Harvard was alone in the United States at that time.

Separately, the Canadian schools and colleges had shown a preference for a football variant inspired by the game played at Rugby School, and with more resemblance to the rugby football game than even Harvard’s own style. Similar to the British public schools which had embraced this variant and its unique structure which would afford a role to all young men, irrespective of their size and stature and, daresay, their athleticism, the rugby game proved popular amongst the grand institutions in Upper and Lower Canada (roughly corresponding to modern day Ontario, Québec) and the Maritime provinces of New Brunswick, Newfoundland and Labrador, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. With their peer schools having agreed a different set of rules, Harvard would be forced to look north to their Canadian peers to find competitors. Thus, when McGill University would visit Harvard in 1874 for a two-game football showcase, they would play the first under the Harvard Crimson’s “Boston game” rules and the second based on their preferred rugby style game. The rugby variant was immediately popular and would change American football forever more, evolving into the gridiron game we know today.

The game would become popular on American campuses, with Harvard, Yale and Princeton, known as the Big Three, competing against one another in an occasional triangular scheduling arrangement beginning in the 1880s but with an accord on regular play starting in 1906.

The sport would develop rapidly through the 1880s, most notably at Yale where student-player and then coach, Walter Camp (Yale ’81), the “Father of Football”⁴⁶, would introduce numerous changes and rules to the game which proved popular on other campuses and would give the American sport its unique style of play. He brought in the line of scrimmage and the concept of downs⁴⁷ ⁴⁸. He also coached some of the sport’s most celebrated players including John Heisman, Pop Warner and Curly Lambeau⁴⁹. Camp would also champion his proprietary training and conditioning methodologies⁵⁰, including a daily calisthenics program⁵¹.

Recognising a need to consolidate and codify their burgeoning sport, coupled with its widespread adaptation at colleges and universities opening across the country, directors of the early college football programs would begin to formalise a standard rulebook. The early game was extremely physical, often described as “brutal”⁴⁵, and college administrators were concerned about the levels of violence demonstrated.

In 1876, representatives from Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale, met to decide on new universal rules, a conference known as the “Massasoit Convention”, for the location of the meeting in Massachusetts⁵³. The four colleges agreed a new set of rules governing intercollegiate football between themselves which leaned heavily into the rugby style game played at Harvard. The rules were quickly adopted by colleges across the country who would peg their own game to rule changes agreed at future meetings. The new rules would dictate competition in the Intercollegiate Football Association, which now included Columbia and Harvard. The Massasoit Convention would meet annually with Walter Camp first attending in 1878 where he proposed reducing the number of players from fifteen to eleven (in the first Princeton v Rutgers game each team fielded twenty-five players!) Camp would propose his other ideas in following years including the introduction of the line of scrimmage, the snap and the concept of downs. Jay Greenberg (2019) gives a great synopsis of the early chaotic development of the sport and the role of Princeton in that period⁵⁴, including burst balls, tactical adjustments, wanton violence and more.

In 1885, discussions between Amherst, Dartmouth and Williams began towards the formation of the New England Intercollegiate Triangular League (the Triangular League) in which the three colleges would play against one another in various varsity sports. At that time, Dartmouth did not have a football program. Dartmouth would, however, set about establishing a football team. In 1886, Amherst, Dartmouth, MIT, and Trinity formed the Northern League⁵⁵ (also called the Northern Intercollegiate Football Association and sometimes the Northeastern Intercollegiate Football Association (NIFA)) which would include the football component of the Triangular League. The following year Dartmouth would play scheduled football games, fielding teams for two competitive matches that year, both of which were against Amherst. Dartmouth’s inability to field a regular team in the initial seasons would see the Northern League based around Amherst, MIT, Tufts, and Williams⁵⁶ ⁵⁷. The conference would be intermittently referred to as the Eastern Intercollegiate Football Association (certainlu it was in 1887) and would see Dartmouth finally scheduled to play, with the additions of Trinity and Stevens Institute of Technology. Williams and Tufts did not participate in that year. Williams rejoined the following year in 1888. Stevens dropped and Bowdoin joined in 1890, before returning to take Bowdoin’s place in 1891. It then became the New England Intercollegiate Football Association / Triangular Football League in 1892 with just Amherst, Williams and Dartmouth. Dartmouth dropped out in 1899 and Wesleyan joined. The conference formally ended in 1901 with a dispute about the eligibility of baseball players who had been in receipt of payment during the summer. In 1910, those three colleges would reform a competitive football league which came to be referred to as the Little Three (a play on the Big Three reference to Harvard, Yale and Princeton). These colleges would also be known as the Triumvirate.

The Northern League (and its various iterations) was the first football conference proper in the United States. The Intercollegiate Football Association that formed at the Massasoit Convention was more of a rules board than a conference with scheduled fixtures. The Northern League also included the first ever college football play-off games which MIT lost to Williams (18 – 10) in 1885⁵⁸, having beaten Amherst 80 – 0 to tie with Williams for the league title. The members of these conferences would continue to play games outside of this schedule against other colleges across the Northeast. MIT famously lost such a match to Yale the following year, beaten 96 – 0 in 1886.

Dartmouth, despite Big Green’s indifferent entry into football, would come to dominate these early conference arrangements, much to the chagrin of the other participants. The student body at the Hanover college was expanding faster than their peers and they were becoming quite the athletic powerhouse. Dartmouth was forced to begin exploring other options for regular competitive play in all sports, especially football. They would start to participate in matches and meets against some of the region’s larger schools, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Columbia, and Cornell.

In 1891, Cornell would play its first football game against upstate New York rivals, Syracuse which would begin a fierce rivalry that would last for decades⁵⁹. Cornell won that game 68 – 0. Their first basketball match would be in 1901, and lacrosse – the main source of their current rivalry, in 1920.

Over the coming decades, these colleges would continue to meet sporadically in a series of athletic meetups, including football and other sports. In 1901, the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL) would be established which saw Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale as its founding members. Penn joined shortly thereafter and Dartmouth by 1911. In this pre-war and interwar period, the Ivies and their peers remained relatively small, private, male-only institutions with a core focus on liberal arts undergraduate programs. Various other conferences would be set up in all manner of sports (we will dive deep into these Ivy League predecessor leagues shortly) which would see, largely, the same group of colleges taking part. These would help shape the future Ivy League and its ultimate membership.

Football, however, was left alone. The nation’s favourite sport, the early game was dominated by the Big Three, regularly voted as national champions (various rankings and selections took place during these years with sports reporters nominating teams as champions). These games were profitable to the colleges and schools were reluctant to rock the boat on lucrative revenue streams. Having the capacity to organise exhibition games and matches against emergent powerhouses was of great value to the various sporting directors. Smaller schools were reluctant to regularise games against the big teams for fear of upsetting their own revenue potential.

Yet, whilst this game would surge in popularity, the unmitigated violence and brutality of some matches would attract the concern and attention of senior lawmakers, not least President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt, Jr. (Harvard ’80). In 1905, he established a commission to review the flourishing sport with a view to developing a national standard, governed by a national rules-based organisation. With an initial meeting involving the representatives of thirteen colleges, the Intercollegiate Athletic Association of the United States (IAAUS) was agreed that December and formally constituted the following year with sixty-two charter members. Some members of the Intercollegiate Football Association saw the body as a threat to their sport and to their stranglehold of the governance thereof. However, Dartmouth and Penn were both charter signatories of the IAAUS, as was Rutgers⁶⁰ alongside many of the future Ivies’ peer schools. This body would change its name a short time later, in 1910, to become the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), reflecting its nationwide status and governing role in collegiate sports, now with many more members from across the country. A rule-setting organisation, the NCAA would establish championships from the 1921 season onwards, effectively sidelining the practice of national champions being determined by vote. This would mark the first substantial challenge to the dominance of the Big Three and their regular competitors. This move would also have a profound impact on the football landscape as more colleges sought to capitalise on the financial gains from operating a successful football program and would flout rules to use monetary incentives to recruit players.

Formalised college sports and greater moves towards a universal education, particularly through the state chartering of public universities, would further challenge the dominance and position of the older, established order. These newer colleges, often with state-of-the-art facilities and generous inducements for incoming athletes (within the rules, of course, except where some were not), began to develop seriously competitive programs that were beginning to outshine that of their predecessors and the early pioneers of the sport. Privately, some of the older colleges resented this changing tide and the increasing focus on student athletics over student academics. A real concern was presenting as to what a college or university’s primary role should be, and faculty were often openly hostile towards the efforts to find routes to graduation for sports stars who might not otherwise pass muster. Rumours swirled of cynical efforts by sports directors to encourage transfers into their programs in order to bolster their teams, win big games and earn big money⁶¹. Donations to school endowments and alumni fundraising efforts were increasingly being linked with athletic performance rather than academic accolades.

The turmoil of the two Great Wars would create further difficulties for the sector as their core customer base of young men were now out to war to fight on behalf of the nation. Many of whom would make the ultimate sacrifice in defence of our freedoms and ideals. Many smaller colleges were finding themselves in a fight for relevance, if not survival, with heavily decreased enrolment numbers against a backdrop of greater academic choice and fewer target students. The exception being the service academies who, at one point had shared the consternation of their ancient peers regarding athletic scholarships and the impact on educational quality but now found themselves dominant forces in collegiate sport once again as hundreds and thousands of young men signed up to their respective service branches. An athletic arms race saw many big schools competing to recruit transfers from the sports programs of Army and Navy. For the others, the need to develop relationships and status through consortia, academic demarcation and athletic conferences was becoming apparent.

In 1944, the Federal Government passed the first of a series of legislative acts, collectively referred to as the GI Bill⁶². These were intended to confer rights on veterans of the wars who had distinguished themselves in service of country. Under these measures, veterans would be able to access heavily funded degree programs at a university of their choice. Colleges would swell in size to a level never seen before on the North American continent. Big schools quickly evolved into massive universities, attracting research grants and opening various new constituent schools and institutes. The supply of enthusiastic, fit young men returning from the trenches and eager to engage in varsity sport would change the nature of their collegiate athletic programs also.

NCAA sanctioned athletics had become even more competitive and many of the member schools were pushing to further elevate the stats of collegiate sport to an even higher level as the revenue potential grew. This was the age of television, but also the advent of the professional era of sports, as professional major and minor leagues were organising on a national scale and locking in media contracts which would harm the market dominance of college sports. The existing NCAA single-division structure was holding back the larger programs who wanted to compete on a grander scale against other big beast schools. Advances in rail, road and air transport made the distances between schools much smaller than they had ever been before, teams could play away and return home within a day: they were no longer geographically restricted and no longer had need to focus on contests with their neighbouring schools.

A movement to restructure the NCAA and allow for major college sports programs was growing, the big schools wanted it, the student-athletes wanted it, the professional leagues wanted it (to the extent that it would incubate talent and produce future stars), and the fans wanted it. Academic leaders did not for fear that academia would be forever destroyed by the dominance of sports over learning. Many older schools with a reputation built upon their academic pedigree resisted effort towards full-ride scholarships for student-athletes and other measures to attract sportsmen to their campuses in preference to the most academically capable students. Increasing pressure to relax admissions standards for big name football players was already transforming the student dynamic and putting athletes on a metaphorical pedestal, with undesired consequences and occasional toxic egotistic behaviour. Professors and administrative staff too had grave concerns about the trend towards play-off games and championship bowls that, whilst financially lucrative, would mean students participating in major, season-defining games during their final assessments and exams.

Nevertheless, the tide was turning and the secretariat of the NCAA allowed for a series of changes beginning in the 1956-57 season which would split sports into a two-tier divisional structure, becoming the three-tier structure we know today (albeit with the top-tier subsequently splitting into the bowl and championship divisions). Thus, whilst an Ivy League conference had been hypothesised for decades and various sporting associations having already been formed which would, ultimately, be absorbed into the Ivy league, it was the changes in NCAA-sanctioned football that would coalesce the relevant administrators, cementing them to the idea of incepting a formal, permanent arrangement. The history of the Ivy League is, a history of college sport and, especially, a history of American football and the game that came to be the nation’s favourite sport.

History

The Ivy League athletics conference was founded in 1954 as a means of consolidating informal sporting arrangements between a select group of universities that considered themselves to be peers at that time. These schools had regularly played against one another in a host of sports, particularly football, rowing, basketball etc. They were the schools that helped develop and codify American football amongst other sports. They participated in the Eastern Intercollegiate Basketball League (EIBL) (since absorbed into the Ivy League) and many of the member schools competed in the Eastern Intercollegiate Wrestling Association and the Intercollegiate Rowing Association. Additionally, many of the schools have a football rivalry with one or another that existed long before the creation of the NCAA. With the advent of televised sports fixtures and the proposals of the NCAA in the early 1950s to develop college football television markets on a league and conference basis, the Ivy League colleges saw the need to establish a formalised conference to protect their markets and to operate within the NCAA structure. Whilst the colleges had long-played each other and a number of other select institutions, it made sense to formalise a full sports conference around the long-established EIBL in which the same eight schools participated. The EIBL only added Brown in the years leading to the establishment of the Ivy League (and, at that stage, it was done so with the expressed purpose of establishing the Ivy League).

The schools that today comprise the Ivy League, have long considered one another to be peers athletically and academically. They have competed against one another and sometime peers (historically including schools like: Army; Bucknell; Colgate; Navy; McGill; Rutgers; Stanford; Syracuse; Toronto; and Tufts, particularly) both in various varsity sporting fixtures and in terms of admissions of the best and brightest minds from across North America. Today, many Ivy League conferences still maintain rivalries and occasional athletics fixtures with those one-time peer schools, especially those competing in the similarly regulated Patriot League. Thus, whilst, the Ivy League is, ostensibly, an athletic conference, it has always been a byword for exclusivity. That remains clear from the outset, the athletic directors and executive leadership of the member institutions set out firm criteria and commitments for academic rigour and exclusivity in order to preserve the reputation and standing of each school.

Such criteria includes strict standards for admissions and academic performance of student athletes. Moreover, it is best known as one of a select-few Division I NCAA conferences that prohibit financial scholarships and support for student athletes with Ivy League members prohibited from availing of the scholarship allowances set by the NCAA.

Notwithstanding that the Ivy League is, fundamentally, an athletics conference, the term “Ivy League” has been in use at least as far back as the 1930s as a description for an exclusive tier of Northeastern schools in the United States. Many of the Ivy League schools were established prior to the United States becoming and independent country (the so-called “Colonial Colleges”). The exact origin of the term remains unclear and has been subject to wide speculation with theories ranging from the common tradition of planting ivy on the campuses of ancient schools and colleges on the East Coast (often known as “Ivy Day” and many of the campuses are heavily decorated with ivy), to the application of Roman numerals to a mythical previous athletics conference comprised of the Big Three: Harvard; Princeton; and Yale and another unidentified school (It is worth noting that, historically, these three schools were collectively referred to as the Big Four alongside Union College – considered to be the preferred destinations for higher learning for the sons of America’s wealthy Protestant elite). The schools also share a close relationship with the so-called Seven Sisters schools (a group of historic women’s colleges that served as a counterpart to the historically male-only Ivy League). The term “Ivy League” has also come to be applied to a fashion subculture that celebrates the typical campus attire of the elite Northeastern colleges during the 1930s to 1960s.

The ambiguity of the term’s origins has contributed to the prestige afforded to the member schools and other schools that seek to be associated therewith. Various authors have ascribed terms such as Little Ivies; Hidden Ivies; Public Ivies; Jesuit/Catholic Ivies, Public Ivies and Black Ivies to a host of other institutions around the United States that hold a similar prestigious reputation but that may exist to serve those that were not the typical Ivy League candidate pre-1950s.

Indeed, communities at a number of Northeastern universities have approached the idea of a hypothesised Ivy League expansion with great fervour in order to boost the perception of their own alma mater as a peer school. It has long been rumoured that other colleges were invited for entry during the initial development of the league, albeit little proof has ever been afforded to back up those claims. It is often raised as a rumour only by those who attended the college to which the rumour they raise refers. Prior to the creation of the Ivy League, a sports journalist argued in 1936 that such a league should be established and, in order to combat accusations of elitism, that Army; Brown; Fordham; Georgetown; Navy; Syracuse; and Pitt should be considered for inclusion alongside the initial EIBL schools. That being said, it is likely that Rutgers may have been considered for admission at one point in time prior to being public and it is known that Rutgers formally inquired about becoming a member in 1953 before being annexed by the State of New Jersey. It has been regularly implied that the College of William and Mary was considered as a peer Colonial College to the core group of Ivy League colleges and considered as a potential candidate for admission to the league prior to its inception.

It is certainly the case that the League has longstanding rivalries and fixtures with both Army and Navy. This lead to speculation in a number of media reports in the 1980s that the League had allegedly considered extending invitations to those service colleges in order to bolster its standing and maintain its participation in the FBS upper divisions of Division I football. Similarly, those same reports indicated Northwestern as another potential candidate. Of the rumours most commonly embraced, however, the most persistent have been attached to Colgate and Bucknell who often compete against Ivy league colleges when not playing in their primary conference – the Patriot League. For some time, the Patriot League emulated the Ivies in their selectivity and their eschewing of athletic scholarships. Albeit, the latter is no longer true.

Outside of these institutions, various names have often been touted, particularly those of similar institutions that may be further afield. Luminaries including: Stanford; Duke; Georgetown; Rice; Emory; Cal Tech; Berkeley; Chicago; Wisconsin; John Hopkins have often been touted as potential or likely candidates for admission to the league. Similarly, MIT; Amherst; Vassar; and, occasionally Carnegie Mellon; Rochester; NYU; or even athletic powerhouses like Holy Cross; Boston College; or Boston University have been postulated. These rumours are often far-fetched given the vast differences in the range of athletics programs and statuses of those programs vis-a-vis the existing Ivy League. More often, these rumours are predicated on the idea that these schools are approaching the Ivy Leagues (or, indeed, exceeding them) in terms of academic pedigree and admissions selectivity. Many commentators have included these schools in the vague terms “Ivy adjacent”, “Ivy Plus”, or “Ivy+”.

The formal inception of the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation in 2011, building on the BorrowDirect scheme that many of the Ivy League university libraries participated in (founded in 1999), put the concept of “Ivy Plus” on a different footing and established the first pillar of the Ivy Plus Consortium. MIT was the first school outside of the Ivy League athletic conference to be invited to participate as it already had an inter-library arrangement with Harvard. The scheme would soon expand to include Johns Hopkins, Chicago, Stanford and Duke. These same thirteen schools would form the core of the Ivy Plus Sustainability Consortium, joined by Georgetown before it expanded to include participation from more than 40 top-rated colleges and universities. Similarly, these thirteen schools would participate in the Ivy Plus Faculty Advancement Network and, with the exception of Johns Hopkins and Duke, the Ivy Plus Exchange Scholars Program (with Berkeley also a member).

No such plans, however, currently exist for Ivy League expansion and it remains unlikely that the league will expand any time soon. For now, the Ivy League remains a grouping of eight top-tier research universities that are benchmarking themselves against their peers across the United States and internationally.

MEMBERS AND ASSOCIATES

CHOOSE LIST VIEW FOR A SIMPLE LIST OF ALL LISTED SCHOOLS. ALTERNATIVELY, YOU CAN SELECT SCHOOLS USING THE MAP BELOW.

LIST VIEW

BROWN

BROWN UNIVERSITY

BROWN STREET, PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND 02912, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1764
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

brown.edu

PROFILE

RHODE ISLAND

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY IN THE CITY OF NEW YORK

1150 AMSTERDAM AVENUE, MORNINGSIDE HEIGHTS, MANHATTAN, NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK 10027, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

INC. BARNARD COLLEGE
ESTABLISHED 1754
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

columbia.edu

PROFILE

NEW YORK

AAU

CAAS

COFHE

THE CONSORTIUM

FAN

GULF

ICCS

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MSCHE

NAICU

STEINWAY

URA

U7+

568 GROUP

CORNELL UNIVERSITY

300 DAY HALL, 10 EAST AVENUE, ITHACA, NEW YORK 14853, UNITED STATES

PUBLIC – PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1865
FEE-PAYING / NON-FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

SCHOOLS AND INSTITUTES:
COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES | COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING | CORNELL INSTITUTE FOR PUBLIC AFFAIRS | CORNELL LAW SCHOOL | CORNELL UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE, ART AND PLANNING | CORNELL UNIVERSITY GRADUATE SCHOOL | NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF AGRICULTURE AND LIFE SCIENCES AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF HUMAN ECOLOGY AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK STATE SCHOOL OF INDUSTRIAL AND LABOR RELATIONS AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NEW YORK STATE COLLEGE OF VETERINARY MEDICINE AT CORNELL UNIVERSITY | NOLAN SCHOOL OF HOTEL ADMINISTRATION | SAMUEL CURTIS JOHNSON GRADUATE SCHOOL OF MANAGEMENT | WEILL CORNELL MEDICINE

cornell.edu

PROFILE

NEW YORK

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

6016 MCNUTT HALL, HANOVER, NEW HAMPSHIRE 03755, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1769
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

dartmouth.edu

PROFILE

NEW HAMPSHIRE

AAU

ABC

COFHE

THE CONSORTIUM

FAN

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MNU

NAICU

NECHE

UARCTIC

12 COLLEGES

568 GROUP

HARVARD UNIVERSITY

1350 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS 02139, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

INC. RADCLIFFE COLLEGE
ESTABLISHED 1636
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
AGES 18+ (UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE)

harvard.edu

PROFILE

MASSACHUSETTS

AAU

AICUM

BOSTON CONSORTIUM

COFHE

FAN

GULF

HMA

ICCS

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

NAICU

NECHE

RSI

URA

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

330 ALEXANDER STREET, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1746
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

princeton.edu

PROFILE

NEW JERSEY

AAU

COFHE

FAN

GULF

ICCS

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MSCHE

NAICU

URA

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA

PENN / UPENN

1350 MASSACHUSETTS AVENUE, CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS 02139, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1740
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

upenn.edu

PROFILE

PENNSYLVANIA

AAU

COFHE

CTTL

FAN

GULF

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

MSCHE

NAICU

QUAKER CONSORTIUM

URA

568 GROUP

YALE

YALE UNIVERSITY

433 TEMPLE STREET, NEW HAVEN, CONNECTICUT 06511, UNITED STATES

PRIVATE UNIVERSITY
RESEARCH UNIVERSITY

ABOUT

ESTABLISHED 1701
FEE-PAYING
CO-EDUCATIONAL
UNDERGRADUATE – POST-DOCTORATE

yale.edu

PROFILE

CONNECTICUT

AAU

COFHE

THE CONSORTIUM

FAN

FGNU

GULF

IARU

IPARC

IPES

IPLC

IPSC

IPWC

IVY +

LAUNCH

NECHE

STEINWAY

URA

INFORMATION

FULL NAME

COUNCIL OF IVY GROUP PRESIDENTS
IVY GROUP

ESTABLISHED

1945 / 1954

CONTACT DETAILS

COUNCIL OF IVY GROUP PRESIDENTS, 228 ALEXANDER STREET, 2^ND FLOOR, PRINCETON, NEW JERSEY 08540, UNITED STATES

ivyleague.com

+1 609 258 6426

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