Make an Ordinary Brand Fancy: Send It to College

Nobody’s sure where the term originated. One story holds that in 1935 eight college athletic teams—Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania—decided to form an exclusive football league. Another account roots the appellation in 1933 when New York Herald Tribune sports writer Stanley Woodward used the term “ivy college” to denote these proud old schools where Hedera helix grows on the stone walls. Whatever its lineage, everybody knows what Ivy League means today—those eight, proud universities that epitomize academic excellence and, more often than not, East Coast establishment snobbery.