Which schools are considered Ivy Plus and why so?
–The Ivy League is a sports league.
–But if you are looking for similarly prestigious and academically excellent schools you can google various lists (you can even google “Ivy Plus colleges”) or look at USNWR (or other) rankings.
–Keep in mind that the colleges may have certain academic disciplines in which they excel.
The 8 ivies, UChicago, Duke, Stanford and MIT.
Thanks so much - I just asked out of curiosity!
Thanks much - it’s clear!
So the Ivy League is a sports conference and its necessary characteristic was basically just that all the colleges in question had to be close enough by team bus to play football with Harvard and Yale. They also wanted it to be made up of reasonably prominent private universities, but there were many universities that potentially could have qualified except they were not close enough physically.
So, like, there was nothing in particular about Cornell that, say, Stanford didn’t have in terms of institutional prominence, but Cornell was reachable by bus and Stanford was not.
OK, then for various reasons, some people started using the term “Ivy” as a generic term for a very good US college, but in the strict sense this necessarily excluded a lot of very good US colleges. There were, say, various public universities that were very good, but they were not in the Ivy League because it is only made up of privates. So, people started talking about “Public Ivies”.
There were also various small liberal arts colleges not part of research universities that were very good, but they could also not be in the Ivy League because it is only made up of research universities, so people started talking about “Little Ivies,” although in that case the geographic footprint was typically limited in the same way as the Ivy League.
And then there are the service academies, which I am not sure are typically included in any Ivy-branded group, which is somewhat ironic because at one point Army and Navy appeared to be on track to be in the actual league–they were in the pre-WWII precursor that played football with Harvard and Yale and such. WWII and the transformation of the service academies largely derailed that, although they were considered again along with Northwestern in 1982.
OK, and then there were these private research universities that many people considered just as good as many, or perhaps any, of the Ivies, but were too far away. And that is the group typically known as Ivy Plus.
But then how to ascertain which prominent research universities should be in the Ivy Plus? There has never been a real formula for that. Part of the problem is the Ivy League itself is pretty diverse, so if you just needed to be a peer of only one Ivy, that would imply a potentially larger Ivy Plus grouping. So conventionally, it is usually restricted to universities that would at least be more like a typical/average/median/etc. Ivy.
Except it also usually includes at least MIT, and sometimes Caltech too. These are not very Ivyish colleges really, so why include them? Well, they are just really famous and selective, and MIT has one of the largest few endowments, and Caltech is way up there per capita, so . . . .
OK, even so, there is never a precise consensus on what private research universities to include. Like, you saw a definition above which only included Chicago, Duke, Stanford, and MIT, but what then about Northwestern, which was actually considered for Ivy membership, and really scores as equivalent (or better) than many Ivies on most traditional measures of prominence? Similarly, what about Hopkins, which does the same?
The other group you might see nominated as possible Ivy Plus are Vanderbilt, Rice, WUSTL, and Emory (and it could be some but not all of those). These are all Ivyish universities in terms of size and format and such, and also are all on the list of top college endowments. Indeed, if you use the smallest Ivy endowment as your line–Brown, incidentally, at #20 overall–the 19 schools higher include all the 7 other Ivies of course. Then the 12 remaining are Stanford, MIT, Notre Dame, Northwestern, Duke, WUSTL, Hopkins, Emory, Chicago, Vanderbilt, USC, and Rice.
Notre Dame is Catholic and, well, just different, and then USC is a much larger university so really not comparable per capita. So take those out and you get 10 Ivyish private research universities with Ivyish endowments.
But again, some people will limit the list to fewer than that. But it is all rather capricious, really.
If you would like a citation, this appeared in the New York Times:
Just noting while that is Chetty’s definition, it is only one of the many definitions floating around.
Like, CV’s definition (not allowed to link it) is Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Caltech, Northwestern, Duke, Hopkins, Vanderbilt, Rice, and WUSTL. So that is an example of a relatively long list.
Quad Education has a similarly expansive notion:
The Ivy Institute then has a sort of medium list:
They keep it to just Stanford, MIT, Chicago, Caltech, Duke, Hopkins, and Northwestern.
Same list at Crimson Education:
And so on.
The closest I know of to an actual institutionally-endorsed list comes from the Ivy Plus Libraries Confederation:
That is a union of 13 libraries, the 8 Ivies and then Chicago, Duke, Hopkins, MIT, and Stanford. But the exclusion of, say, Northwestern may just be because Northwestern’s library did not want to be in this group for some reason (could be a Big 10 thing, for example).
I concur, and I’m glad that the Times phrased this accordingly, at least in this article.
The term public ivy has a very specific origin.
After much consulting and campus visiting, he compiled his list of the eight best public colleges and universities in America. In alphabetical order, they are: the University of California at Berkeley, Miami University in Ohio, University of Michigan, University of North Carolina, University of Texas, University of Vermont, University of Virginia and William and Mary College in Virginia.
That is indeed the usual cited first use. I note he also had 9 “runner up” universities–Colorado, Georgia Tech, Illinois, New College of Florida, Penn State, Pitt, Binghamton, Washington, and Wisconsin.
Of course since then it has been used differently by others. Howard and Matthew Greene published a list of 30 in a book in 2001, Forbes just released a “New Ivies” list with 10 publics, and so on.
Here’s how I think of it:
- The eight Ivy League schools
- Caltech, Chicago, MIT, Stanford, Duke, Hopkins, Northwestern
- Maybe also CMU, Emory, Georgetown, Notre Dame, Rice, Vandy, Wash U
Like any other grouping exercise, one wonders where to draw the line…
A substantial percentage of people around here feel there is no value to attending a highly selective school, so there is no line to be drawn, since to them it is a meaningless term.
If you think there is value in attending a highly selective institution, then for a term like IvyPlus to have any meaning, it would be best to defer to a certain level of expertise (like the Raj Chetty link above).
I think it is important to understand what happened there.
Chetty did not derive that definition from any sort of empirical analysis. He assumed it in order to be able to perform his empirical analysis. He then did find some statistical differences between his defined group of Ivy Plus and Other Highly Selective Privates, but only in a collective sense, and did not test boundary cases.
So, for example, Chetty’s study does not provide evidence that, say, Chicago produces a different or better distribution of outcomes than Hopkins, or Cornell versus Northwestern, or so on. Indeed, it is entirely possible you could swap around various colleges like that and not change the collective statistics at all.
Just curious, how do you know this for an absolute fact?
Which of course depends on what you intend to do with this category.
Like, personally, I would not advise using it for college selection purposes. Indeed, as various Ivy League officials have explained over time, there is no particular reason to view the Ivy League itself as a coherent group for that purpose, as there are too many material differences between them. Indeed, by most substantive measures, they each individually have closer peers outside the Ivy League than at least some of the other members in the Ivy League.
So if the Ivy League itself is a rather unfortunate grouping, why build off it with the Ivy Plus concept? Well, I think part of the idea is really to combat that precise notion that the Ivy League itself is somehow particularly special, versus just a subset of a certain kind of college in a certain geographic region. So from that perspective it is meant to encourage a more flexible way of thinking about US colleges and universities, same as with Little Ivies, Public Ivies, and so on.
Unfortunately, though, there are always some people looking to promote a sense of scarcity/exclusivity, and therefore there are always some people looking to enforce a particularly rigidly defined sense of what would normally seem to be by nature loose, informal terms.
My two cents, though, is the most useful things we can get out of a discussion like this are: (1) reinforcement of the observation the Ivy League itself is not really a coherent grouping outside of the specific context of sports; and (2) a deeper understanding of the various ways colleges could be considered peers, or not, such as to enable a richer investigation of college options.
The OP has gotten an answer to their question and since this thread is spiraling OT, and to questions already posed and discussed in other threads, I’m closing this thread.