Ivy League
The term "Ivy League" is informally used to describe eight East Coast universities—Brown, Cornell, Columbia, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale—which are acknowledged as among the most prestigious postsecondary schools in the United States. The ivy image derives from the fact that these institutions are also among the oldest in the country, with stately buildings and beautiful historic campuses. Because of highly selective admissions criteria, an "Ivy League" degree represents the near-guarantee that a graduate will rise to the top of his—or, only since the 1970s, her—profession (the Ivy League colleges were originally all-male institutions). As educational writer Joseph Thelin wrote, the mystique of the Ivy League describes "the process by which the collegiate ideal has been … associated with trade marks, and brand-name imagery."
The term itself did not originally connote academic excellence: it was coined in the late 1930s by Cas Adams, a New York Herald-Tribune reporter, who bestowed the name on the schools because he noticed that buildings on all eight campuses were covered in vines. Before the 1880s, as Thelin wrote, "contacts between these institutions were few" until intercollegiate athletic teams began to develop.
A view of the Ivy League's Yale University.Walter Camp, a Yale student in the 1870s, had all but invented college football and, by the turn of the century, the eight universities were dominating the sport.
With applications to most Ivy League universities topping 20,000 a year by the 1990s, and acceptance rates hovering between 10 and 15 percent, it is not hard to see how the Ivy League sets the benchmark of exclusivity against which other postsecondary institutions are measured. Many high school seniors and their parents invest so much in acceptances—from SAT preparation classes to costly counselors—that they overlook colleges that do not have such recognizable brand names. Loren Pope, author of the college-application handbook Looking beyond the Ivy League, is one of many authors who try to dispel myths of an Ivy League education as making or breaking one's future success. The first myth on Pope's agenda is "An Ivy … College Will Absolutely Guarantee the Rich, Full, and Successful Life." More often than not, however, efforts to dispel these myths serve only to perpetuate them.
Further Reading:
Goldstein, Richard. Ivy League Autumns. New York, St. Martin's Press, 1996.
Pope, Loren. Looking beyond the Ivy League. New York, Penguin, 1995.
Thelin, John. The Cultivation of Ivy: A Saga of the College in America. Cambridge, Massachusetts, Schenkman Publishing, 1976.
This is the complete article, containing 405 words
(approx. 1 page at 300 words per page).
