Claim: Facebook expanded to Yale and Princeton.

The Ivy League is a collegiate athletic conference comprising sports teams from eight private institutions of higher education in the Northeastern United States . The conference name is also commonly used to refer to those eight schools as a group beyond the sports context . The eight institutions are Brown University , Columbia University , Cornell University , Dartmouth College , Harvard University , the University of Pennsylvania , Princeton University , and Yale University . The term Ivy League has connotations of academic excellence , selectivity in admissions , and social elitism .   While the term was in use as early as 1933 , it only became official after the formation of the NCAA Division I athletic conference in 1954 . Seven of the eight schools were founded during the United States colonial period . Cornell was founded in 1865 . Ivy League institutions account for seven of the nine Colonial Colleges chartered before the American Revolution ; the other two are Rutgers University and the College of William & Mary .   Ivy League schools are generally viewed as some of the most prestigious , and are ranked among the best universities worldwide by U.S. News & World Report . All eight universities place in the top fifteen of the U.S. News & World Report 2017 nation university rankings , including the top four schools and five of the top eight . U.S. News has named a member of the Ivy League as the best national university in each of the past seventeen years ending with the 2017 rankings : Princeton ten times , Harvard twice , and the two schools tied for first five times .   Undergraduate enrollments range from about 4,000 to 14,000 , making them larger than those of a typical private liberal arts college and smaller than a typical public state university . Total enrollments , including graduate students , range from approximately 6,400 at Dartmouth to over 20,000 at Columbia , Cornell , Harvard , and Penn. . Ivy League financial endowments range from Brown 's $ 3.2 billion to Harvard 's $ 36.4 billion , the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world .