Outside of the US, it seems to be Harvard & the Ivy League as opposed to Harvard, Yale, Princeton & the Ivy League. My impression is that NYU has more name recognition outside the US than do the other seven Ivies. But this is just my impression from travel & educational websites.
re #11`: Is that true? Link?
I don’t recall hearing about that one before. To me it doesn’t make much practical sense.
Were they really going to be willing to drive that team bus, for some minor sport, between Princeton NJ and Evanston Illinois?
There are a few other schools who have claimed this: Rutgers, for one. Then maybe William & Mary? Maybe Union College?
But I don’t recall that any of those claims were found to be actually true.
At least those places were geographically proximate enough to play sports with.
Having been through this exercise several times with Nigerian internationals, the answer is “yes”, vast stretches of the globe, including China and Sub-Saharan Africa, are able to name each of the eight Ivy League colleges. Whether you call it marketing or merely branding, the lack of the Ivy label is inevitably a deal breaker in those cases where the applicant has a viable choice. In the vast majority of cases, the Ivy (with a Big I) designation along with the USNews ranking are the only two things by which they may make comparisons, given that they do not have the money to travel to the United States.
Other than discussing options around a keg, I don’t believe anything ever got off the ground. Here are a couple of articles:
https://www.thecrimson.com/article/1982/1/11/ivies-considering-an-expansion-in-response/
https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/10/sports/ivy-league-considers-adding-2-schools.html
Northwestern decided not to pursue the option/offer any further due to the distance between Chicago area & the Ivies.
Also, at one time Northwestern & the University of Chicago were going to become one due to Chicago’s financial problems.
But, as far as NU & the Ivy League, playing bad football has its upsides.
With the new athletic facilities & with a great football coach, Northwestern is unlikely to receive such interest again. (But Cornell should join the Big 10.)
I don’t think ivies need to market themselves at all because posts like this have already done a fine job for them.
HYP, and to a lesser extent Columbia and UPenn, have enormous endowments and are influential in a number of dimensions. As a thought experiment, if Dartmouth/Brown/Cornell had never been part of the Ivy League, would they be nearly as prestigious as they are today?
Ivy Ball in HKG is very well attended each year.
Dartmouth College & Brown University would mesh nicely with the elite Northeastern US LACs. Cornell should be in the Big 10 in my opinion (and I mean that as a compliment) since they are a hybrid private/public school and get their university presidents from Big 10 schools. And since they profess to be a Big 10 school at heart.
Northwestern is more Ivy League than Big 10 academically & endowment wise --would be the fourth or fifth largest endowment among the Ivies, but would never leave the Big Money of the Big 10. The University of Chicago should be Ivy League based on its academics, endowment & football team.
Look over to the left about four inches. What does it say over there under Top Forums?
There’s one forum called “Colleges and Universities” that contains threads on many hundreds of colleges ranging from Stanford to Whatev State University.
And then there’s another forum which rivals it in popularity, while only dealing with 8 small colleges.
And the title of that thread is…wait for it…Ivy League. QED.
Ivy League is THE brand in U. S Higher Ed. And probably THE brand globally too, although that is probably a bit more debate-able.
“HYP, and to a lesser extent Columbia and UPenn, have enormous endowments and are influential in a number of dimensions. As a thought experiment, if Dartmouth/Brown/Cornell had never been part of the Ivy League, would they be nearly as prestigious as they are today?”
Talk to a graduate of any of the other 5 Ivies. Without fail, they will define the “real” Ivy League schools as H, Y, P and my school. With the other four being described as pretenders, second class citizens, hangers on or safety schools.
Columbia and Penn may look fancy today, but not too long ago (when highly urban campuses were out of fashion) they were the bottom of the Ivy barrel.
1988 USNWR had it:
H2, Y3, P4, D6, B10, C11, Columbia #18 and Penn #19.
My son very explicitly did NOT want to attend an Ivy – he said he wasn’t a climber, like some of his cousins who attended Princeton, Brown, and Stanford. Little did he know that by attending UChicago he was enrolled in a school that is now sometimes referred to as an Ivy-like institution.
Basically, he wasn’t interested in the reputation of the college. He wanted to attend a college “where it’s safe to be a thinker.”
“Northwestern is more Ivy League than Big 10 academically & endowment wise --would be the fourth or fifth largest endowment among the Ivies, but would never leave the Big Money of the Big 10.”
“Academically and endowment wise,” NU and Michigan are peers.
" Little did he know that by attending UChicago he was enrolled in a school that is now sometimes referred to as an Ivy-like institution."
UChi is a great school, but it has a lousy name/brand. The obvious/better name would have been Rockefeller University, which is how most of its peers are named.
“Talk to a graduate of any of the other 5 Ivies. Without fail, they will define the “real” Ivy League schools as H, Y, P and my school. With the other four being described as pretenders, second class citizens, hangers on or safety schools.”
“Without fail?” Nope. D2 is a graduate of Dartmouth and I have never heard her assert that any of the 7 other schools don’t belong or are “pretenders.” In my experience schools not in the Ivy League (and their boosters) are far more obsessed with the concept and term Ivy League than the actual Ivy League schools and their students are.
And to the OP’s point - has anyone ever seen an actual Ivy league marketing campaign? I haven’t. The Ivy league doesn’t spend a dime on marketing itself. It doesn’t have to. Popular culture in general and Hollywood in particular does it for them - for free.
@northwesty: Duh. UChicago has attracted an enormous number of applicants without using the “Rockefeller” name, which I would venture a guess less than a fourth of college applicants even find familiar. Rockefeller who, what? I know that name from my generation and my parents’ generation. But my kids? Well, they live in NYC now, so they know the name. But coming out of small-town midwest they had little awareness of the name. The University of Chicago? Hey, that’s in a real city, right? Northwestern? Where’s that?
If Dartmouth and Brown suddenly switched to the NESCAC and Cornell to the Big 10 athletic conferences, I’d expect their prestige to only take a small hit. The vast majority of students who apply would continue to apply with the different athletic conference.
What would hypothetically have happened if they had never been a part of the Ivy League is less clear. Dartmouth and Brown were 2 of the 9 Colonial Colleges, which have centuries of history. The colleges were known among many wealthy and connected persons prior to establishment of the Ivy League in the 1950s. For example, Rockefeller’s only male child attended Brown in the late 1800s. If they instead joined different athletic conferences in the 50s, I’d expect that they would still be prestigious today, but they would take somewhat of a hit due to being less connected to HYP.
The academic consolidation of Ivy League colleges appears to have been a relatively recent phenomenon, at least when considered by entering factors. By SAT score tiers this is how they appeared, amid the context of other schools, circa 1960:
Amherst
Carleton
Columbia
Harvard
Haverford
Princeton
Reed
Rice
Swarthmore
Williams
Yale
Brandeis
Brown
Chicago
Cornell
Dartmouth
Hamilton
Johns Hopkins
Lehigh
Oberlin
Rochester
Stanford
Antioch
Bowdoin
Duke
Kenyon
Michigan
Middlebury
Northwestern
Pennsylvania
UIowa
Tufts
Union
UC-Berkeley
Sewanee
(Life, 3 Oct 1960.)
One thing to remember about all the “Ivy League” talk is that concept and the term both existed before the athletic conference did. The Ivy League didn’t leap into existence with the establishment of the conference in 1954. Those eight schools plus one or two more old, prestigious colleges located in the northeast were already commonly collectively referred to as the Ivy League for decades before the athletic conference was founded.
I guess some missed the point, the masterful job of marketing was they didn’t have to do any marketing………they had others do it for them (through the constant comparison) how about the phrase “to be Ivy like”, btw just make that up.