<p>there are so many schools out there that SHOULD be in the IL but aren’t. I guess some of them are MIT, Caltech, UCLA…any more you guys now?</p>
<p>[Ivy</a> League - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League]Ivy”>Ivy League - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>You can’t be “eligible” to be in the Ivy League - what a concept. Actually, the Ivy League wasn’t even founded with an academic focus in the beginning ; )</p>
<p>We have the acronym HYPSM which is a made up one standing for Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and MIT. Only the first three participate (or rather participated in the ivy league), Stanford is a part of PAC-10. HYPSM indicates colleges of a certain standing irrespective of what their sports affiliation is/was.</p>
<p>Hence, I think your question is “Which are the schools that can be considered to be IVY league quality or reputation (what ever that means) but are not officially called ivy league schools?” Asking it that way will get you a different answer.</p>
<p>UCLA is a very good school, but I don’t think they would fall into an ivy league like bracket, if exclusiveness is the criteria.</p>
<p>I believe it’s a great idea for non ivy top universities to create their own league. This should contain universities such as MIT, caltech, UCLA, NYU, Northwestern, Stanford, University of Michigan Ann arbor, Duke, John Hopkins, Rice and Chicago</p>
<p>So they could play football together? Are you joking?</p>
<p>Isnt that like a really silly question? No school can be ‘eligible’ to be in the Ivy League. Ivy League is an athletic conference. And heck, even MIT is not an Ivy League instituition.</p>
<p>
The Ivies are:</p>
<p>– Private
– Located in the Northeast
– Need-blind and do not offer merit aid
– Founded in the 17th or 18th century (except Cornell)</p>
<p>UCLA meets none of these “criteria.” Caltech meets only one.</p>
<p>
Although the pathetic Duke football team might fare better against Rice or Hopkins, there is no way those universities would agree to such a thing. Athletics are a MAJOR source of revenue at Stanford, Michigan, UCLA, Northwestern, and even Hopkins. </p>
<p>That said, something similar to what you suggest already exists:
[University</a> Athletic Association - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_Athletic_Association]University”>University Athletic Association - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>An important question would be: why would they want to be in the Ivy league? Most of them are doing really well for themselves on their own.</p>
<p>Take the Big 10 (11 counting Penn State). For years there had been underground efforts to get Notre Dame in the Big 10 – for a while it was the most competitive conference in college football. Notre Dame repeatedly shut the B10 down, because they were winning national championships and gaining lucrative TV contracts all on their own. They didn’t need to be in a prestigious football conference, because they were plenty prestigious on their own.</p>
<p>MIT, Caltech, and Stanford aren’t exactly hurting in the reputation department.</p>
<p>Of course the efforts have been revived today, only now both the Big 10 and ND are mediocre… :p</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Not for international students!</p>
<p>If anyone was going to do anything, it would be UChicago becoming a D1 program and joining the Big 10 (since the Big 10 is looking for 1 more school), considering that UChicago was an original member of the Big 10, but disbanded its sports programs in WWII due to the manhattan project.</p>
<p>The Ivy League was originally formed as an athletic conference in the 1950s IIRC.</p>
<p>Chicago abandoned its athletic program because its president and trustees thought it was distracting from the university’s academic mission. It revived its athletic program (on a much-reduced, D-III level) because a later generation thought that it would contribute positively to student spirit and wellbeing.</p>
<p>The first controlled nuclear fission in the US was performed in a facility on what used to be Chicago’s football field, but the football had been discontinued before anyone decided to build nukes there.</p>
<p>As an earlier poster pointed out, the University Athletic Association is a D-III league of pretty high-quality academic universities: Chicago, Carnegie-Mellon, NYU, WUStL, Emory, Brandeis, Case Western, and Rochester. Lotta expensive travel there, though – Boston to St. Louis, or Atlanta to Chicago, are not small trips. </p>
<p>Another athletic league that is increasingly serving as a brand for academic quality is NESCAC (which I think stands for New England Small College Athletic Conference), that includes Williams, Amherst, Wesleyan, Tufts, Middlebury, Hamilton, Trinity, Connecticut College, and the three Maine LACs. It is modeled on the Ivy League, and its rules include various restrictions on recruiting to preserve the members’ academic standards.</p>
<p>Thanks for the clarification about UChicago, It would still be awesome to seem the rejoin the big 10 though.</p>
<p>The University Athletic Association were known as the “Nerdy Nine” until Johns Hopkins dropped out. Nerdy Eight doesn’t have the same ring.</p>