The Ivy Leauge

Ivy League schools are generally viewed as some of the most prestigious, and are ranked among the best universities worldwide.

'Ivy League' officially refers to an athletic conference in which the eight colleges' sports teams compete, it has grown to have much wider connotations, because the members of the Ivy League compete academically as well as athletically. The first known instance of the term Ivy League being used appeared in The Christian Science Monitor on February 7, 1935.

"Ivy League" is sometimes used as a way of referring to an elite class, even though institutions such as Cornell University were among the first in the United States to reject racial and gender discrimination in their admissions policies.

The Ivy League schools are highly selective, with acceptance rates since 2000 ranging from 6% to 16% at each of the universities.They are also very expensive to attend, with fees averaging $35,000 (£21,800) a year.

 Total enrollments, including graduate students, range from approximately 6,100 at Dartmouth to over 20,000 at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and Penn. Ivy League financial endowments range from Brown's $3 billion to Harvard's $36.4 billion, the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world.

Ivy League members have produced many Nobel laureates, winners of the Nobel Prize and the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. Listed from in order from greatest number of Nobel laureates are: Harvard with 153 Nobel winners, the most out of any university in the world. This is followed by Columbia with 101 winners, Yale with 52, Cornell with 45, Princeton with 37, and Penn with 29 Nobel laureates.