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...