Ivy League
- Areas Of Involvement:
- sports
- college
- How Did the Ivy League Get Its Name?
- Related People:
- Red Blaik
News •
Ivy League, a group of eight colleges and universities in the northeastern United States that are widely regarded for their high academic standards, selectivity in admissions, and social prestige. The schools are among the most prestigious institutions in the world.
The association with ivy likely derives from the popular 19th-century ceremony of “planting the ivy,” an evergreen plant symbolic of enduring growth, on college and university campuses. The planting ceremony became known as Ivy Day. (Today, Ivy Day, which typically falls in late March or the first of April, is when Ivy League schools release their admission decisions.)
The notion of a “league” reportedly derived from sportswriter Stanley Woodward of the New York Herald Tribune, who in 1933 wrote about athletic competitions between the “ivy colleges.” Popular discussion of an athletic “league” for these “ivy colleges” soon followed. Although athletic competition between the colleges dates back to football meetings in the 1870s, an official Ivy League conference was not formed until 1954, with league competition formally beginning in 1956–57.
To learn more about the genesis of the Ivy League, see How Did the Ivy League Get Its Name?
List of Ivy League schools
| School | Location | Date established |
|---|---|---|
| Harvard University | Cambridge, Massachusetts | 1636 |
| Yale University | New Haven, Connecticut | 1701 |
| University of Pennsylvania | Philadelphia, Pennsylvania | 1740 |
| Princeton University | Princeton, New Jersey | 1746 |
| Columbia University | New York, New York | 1754 |
| Brown University | Providence, Rhode Island | 1764 |
| Dartmouth College | Hanover, New Hampshire | 1769 |
| Cornell University | Ithaca, New York | 1865 |