page_title: Ivy League
section_title: Pre-Ivy League
hierarchical_section_title: Ivy League / History / Pre-Ivy League
caption_attribution_description: "Cornell" Print shows a baseball player, from Cornell University, holding bat. 1 print (poster)&#160;: chromolithograph.
context_page_description: The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference comprising eight private universities in the Northeastern United States. The term Ivy League is typically used beyond the sports context to refer to the eight schools as a group of elite colleges with connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism. Its members are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, the University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University.
  While the term was in use as early as 1933, it became official only after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference in 1954. All of the Ivies except Cornell were founded during the colonial period; they thus account for seven of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution. The other two colonial colleges, Rutgers University and the College of William & Mary, became public institutions instead.
  Ivy League schools are viewed as some of the most prestigious universities in the world. All eight universities place in the top 17 of the 2020 U.S.
context_section_description: Seven out of the eight Ivy League schools were founded before the American Revolution; Cornell was founded just after the American Civil War. These seven were the primary colleges in the Northern and Middle Colonies, and their early faculties and founding boards were largely drawn from other Ivy League institutions. There were also some British graduates from the University of Cambridge, the University of Oxford, the University of St. Andrews, the University of Edinburgh, and elsewhere on their boards. Similarly, the founder of the College of William & Mary, in 1693, was a British graduate of the University of Aberdeen and the University of Edinburgh. Cornell provided Stanford University with its first president.
  The influence of these institutions on the founding of other colleges and universities is notable. This included the Southern public college movement which blossomed in the decades surrounding the turn of the 19th century when Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina and Virginia established what became the flagship universities for each of these states. In 1801, a majority of the first board of trustees for what became the University of South Carolina were Princeton alumni. They appointed Jonathan Maxcy, a Brown graduate, as the university's first president. Thomas Cooper, an Oxford alumnus and University of Pennsylvania faculty member, became the second president of the South Carolina college. The founders of the University of California, Berkeley came from Yale, hence the school colors of University of California at Berkeley are Yale Blue and California Gold.
  Some of the Ivy League schools have identifiable Protestant roots, while others were founded as non-sectarian schools. King's College was founded at the behest of King George II of Great Britain and the Church of England, but renamed Columbia College following the American revolution. In the early nineteenth century, the specific purpose of training Calvinist ministers was handed off to theological seminaries, but a denominational tone and such relics as compulsory chapel often lasted well into the twentieth century. Penn and Brown were officially founded as nonsectarian schools. Brown's charter promised no religious tests and "full liberty of conscience", but placed control in the hands of a board of twenty-two Baptists, five Quakers, four Congregationalists, and five Episcopalians. Cornell has been strongly nonsectarian from its founding.
  "Ivy League" is sometimes used as a way of referring to an elite class, even though institutions such as Cornell University were among the first in the United States to reject racial and gender discrimination in their admissions policies. This dates back to at least 1935. Novels and memoirs attest this sense, as a social elite; to some degree independent of the actual schools.
  After the Second World War, the present Ivy League institutions slowly widened their selection of their students. They had always had distinguished faculties; some of the first Americans with doctorates had taught for them; but they now decided that they could not both be world-class research institutions and be competitive in the highest ranks of American college sport; in addition, the schools experienced the scandals of any other big-time football programs, although more quietly.
caption: Cornell baseball player, 1908
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