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Ivy League
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The Ivy League has not been a focus of fevered longing for very long. For most of this nation's history, college was a local endeavor. The best and the brightest did not go far to go to college. Then, a convergence of societal trends in the late part of the last century quietly nationalized education, without anyone really noticing. The advent of cheap air travel--and the breakdown of regional differences due to television and the migration of educated workers throughout the country--combined to make bright young people look nationally for college choices. So this collection of venerable schools became a focus of their attentions. The problem is that young people and their families didn't catch on to the level of competition that this change entailed.
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The Ivy League is comprised of Princeton University, Harvard University, Cornell University, Brown University, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University, Columbia University, and Dartmouth College. The most erstwhile university is Harvard University founded in 1636, while Cornell was founded last of the eight schools in 1865. The title Ivy League is said to come from the ivy that grow on the outside of the old buildings that comprise the campuses.
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As a group, the Ivy League has or had an identifiable Protestant "tone." Church of England King's College broke up in the Revolution, and was reformed as public non-sectarian Columbia College. In the early nineteenth century, the specific purpose of training Calvinist ministers was handed off to theological seminaries; but a denominational tone, and such relics as compulsory chapel, often lasted well into the twentieth century. Penn and Brown were officially founded as nonsectarian; Brown's charter promised no religious tests and "full liberty of conscience," but placed control in the hands of a board of twenty-two Baptists, five Quakers, four Congregationalists, and five Episcopalians. Cornell has always been strongly non-sectarian.
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Each of the Ivy League colleges: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Penn, Princeton and Yale has its own admissions criteria. In other words, an SAT score of 2100 means one thing at Brown, another thing at Cornell, and something else to the other six Ivy League colleges. This leaves most students and parents with the following problem . . .
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Although the Ivy League schools spent many years denying they used any kind of formula, they in fact have been using a ranking formula since the 1950’s called the Academic Index, AI for short. Though it has traditionally been used for sports purposes (maintaining some kind of academic standard on the various athletic teams), every Ivy League school still calculates an AI for every student. Why? Because the average AI of the athletic teams cannot be more than one standard deviation away from the average AI of the entire class, but the only way to know that is to calculate an AI for every student. Naturally since the number was so easy to generate, many schools began to print the number right on the front of every student’s folder and used it to help them rank a student academically. Please understand that the AI is just a statistical tool – it does not take into account a student’s essays, teacher recommendations, outside achievements or awards.
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Seven of the Ivy League schools are older than the American Revolution; Cornell was founded just after the American Civil War. These seven provided the overwhelming majority of the higher education in the Northern and Middle Colonies; their early faculties and founding boards were largely, therefore, drawn from other Ivy League institutions; there were ... some British graduates - more from the University of Cambridge than Oxford, but also from the University of Edinburgh and elsewhere. The founders of Rutgers, in 1766, were largely Ivy; and so for many of the colleges formed after the Revolution. Cornell provided Stanford University with its first president and most of Stanford's initial faculty members were Cornell professors. The founders of UC Berkeley came from Yale, hence their school colors of Yale Blue, and California Gold.[32]
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Ivy League