Seven Eastern universities—Harvard (Cambridge, Massachusetts), Yale (New Haven, Connecticut), Princeton (Princeton, New Jersey), Dartmouth (Hanover, New Hampshire), Brown (Providence, Rhode Island), Cornell (Ithaca, New York), Columbia (New York City) and the University of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia)—constitute America’s oldest and most prestigious college association. Harvard, with an endowment of $13 billion, was founded in 1636, with Yale following in 1702, both with religious support. The University of Pennsylvania, was founded later by Benjamin Franklin. Mainly male until the 1960s, all are now co-educational.

The name evokes an elite style of academic life, with ivy-covered halls and gentlemen scholars, embodied in a football association that grouped these schools together in 1898.

Although athletics continues to be a unifying feature, the schools are more likely to be characterized today by their wealth as private institutions (Cornell also includes some state programs). The renown of their faculties and the selectivity of their student body within the US and the world matches the importance of their libraries and laboratories as national resource centers.

All these schools include both undergraduate programs and well-known graduate and professional schools which have produced recent American leaders like John F. Kennedy (Harvard), Al Gore (Harvard), George Bush (Yale) and Bill and Hillary Clinton (Yale Law), as well as world figures like Benazir Bhutto (Harvard) and stars like Brooke Shields (Princeton) and Jodie Foster (Yale). All these schools have organized and active alumni networks.

In general, despite a widening student body since the 1960s, they appear in popular culture as shorthand for a social and economic elite (for example, “preppie” or Ivy League clothes in the 1950s and 1960s).