The question is academic because the Ivy League is not looking to expand. I think the OP is seeking to create a buzz for the inclusion of his school. The athletic facet of the Ivy League is of little importance to the Ivy League mystique. Yes, it is 8 schools, but it’s also a place in both the American imagination (think F Scott Fitzgeralds longing to belong at Princeton) and American history (Roosevelts, Adamses and Kennedys at Harvard, Tafts and Bushes at Yale). It’s social cachet is unparalleled. Here in New England, the upper class for years was defined by those who attended boarding schools here which fed into these elite schools. For about the last 100 years, successive waves of immigrants yearned to see their children attend them so as to show they as a group had arrived socially in America. The schools mentioned as potential additions don’t share this history. The Ivy League doesn’t need to add members, as they don’t need to dilute the brand. So all you MIT-Stanford-Duke-Chicago-Hopkins-Georgetown advocates with your faces pressed up against the window, move along, ain’t gonna happen. Your brands are strong enough, and unique enough, to make you attractive and formidable alternatives for the students who thrive on what you offer.
CTDadof2 is exactly correct: the Ivy League does not need or want to dilute its brand. Even though, as OP stated, many in the USA cannot even name the eight schools, what does that matter? The Ivies are not powerhouses in basketball and football, the focus of interest in colleges for the average American.
But what of the countless posters on CC begging ‘chance me, chance me!’ for the Ivies? As if the Ivy brand is primarily the surest educational guarantee of prestige, money, access to power. (As if Brown and Dartmouth are interchangeable). Every year it seems I see a story of some genius of humble origins who was accepted into all the Ivies. There’s the Holy Grail of higher ed.
No, I disagree…that is the Holy Grail of aspirational high schoolers and their parents.