Ivy League colleges and universities in close up

University

composed of 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.
The eight institutions are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale University.

City, New York
Cornell University - Ithaca, New York
Dartmouth College -

Hanover, New Hampshire
Harvard University - Cambridge, Massachusetts
Princeton University - Princeton, New Jersey
University of Pennsylvania - Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Yale University - New Haven, Connecticut

the ivied walls of older colleges.
Seven of the eight schools

were founded during the United States colonial period; the exception is Cornell, which was founded in 1865.
Ivy League schools are viewed as some of the most prestigious, and are ranked amongst the best universities in the United States and worldwide.
Undergraduate enrollments among the Ivy League schools range from about 4,000 to 14,000.
Ivy League university financial endowments range from Brown's $2.2 billion to Harvard's $32 billion.

Ivy covering West College, Princeton University

located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by

the Massachusetts legislature.
Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country.
Harvard's history, influence, and wealth have made it one of the most prestigious universities in the world.

— teaching and research — in which the University's range

and quality are superb.
Harvard's faculty and academic facilities — laboratories, libraries, museums, and research centers — are unsurpassed by those of any institution.
The depth and breadth of the curriculum are vast, extending well beyond course offerings to many other special programs and research opportunities.

the first year by a freshman adviser.
There is no

"freshman program"; students make their own decisions about the level and pace at which to start their undergraduate study.
The faculty has determined that an undergraduate education requires the refinement of writing skills (through a single, one-semester course), a requirement all students address in their first year at Harvard.

last three years, students live in a single House community,

which ranges in size from 350 to 500 students.
At the end of the first year students choose friends with whom to block in the Housing lottery, which guarantees their placement together in one of the twelve residential Houses.
As in the Yard, rooming groups and bathrooms are single-sex and students generally live in suites of rooms.
Each House has its own library, dining hall and common rooms, and also offers a wide range of formal and informal advising resources through its resident and non-resident tutors and faculty fellows.

more than 400 official student organizations including performing and visual

arts groups, 41 varsity athletic teams, student government, public service organizations, more than 50 ethnic and cultural groups, publications, and media projects. In addition, students take advantage of living in Harvard Square, frequenting its movie theaters, bookstores, ice cream shops, cafes, and the many specialty shops.
Athletics play a significant role in the lives of many Harvard students. There are 41 Division I intercollegiate varsity sports teams for women and men at Harvard, more than any other Division I college in the country. The Department of Athletics also offers more than 30 programs in a range of recreational and individual sports.

100 central and auxiliary collections and more than 16 million

volumes, is the world's largest university library.
Widener Library is the centerpiece of the library system, and students have full access to its 5 miles of open stacks, spread among 10 floors, which hold nearly 3 million volumes.
In addition to Widener Library, there are 12 science libraries, a music library, the world's largest anthropological library, and individual House libraries, to name just a few.
These vast resources contain special collections as well as all assigned and recommended reading in every course and tutorial offered.

Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of

higher education in the United States.
In 1718, the College was renamed "Yale College" to honor a gift from Elihu Yale, a governor of the British East India Company.
Was ranked 11th in the world in 2012.

known as the Yale Corporation, is the governing board of

the University.
Yale's president Richard C. Levin is one of the highest paid university presidents in the United States with a 2008 salary of $1.5 million.
Yale has a history of difficult and prolonged labor negotiations, often culminating in strikes.[64] There have been at least eight strikes since 1968, and The New York Times wrote that Yale has a reputation as having the worst record of labor tension of any university in the U.S.

well as for several iconic modern buildings.
Yale's central campus in

downtown New Haven covers 260 acres (1.1 km2).
An additional 500 acres (2.0 km2) includes the Yale golf course and nature preserves in rural Connecticut and Horse Island.

Yale Law School

Connecticut Hall

the second-largest university collection in the United States.
The main library,

Sterling Memorial Library, contains about 4 million volumes, and other holdings are dispersed at subject libraries.
Rare books are found in a number of Yale collections.

Yale University's Sterling Memorial Library

passage from their "bright college years“.
Yale's student tour guides tell

visitors that students consider it good luck to rub the toe of the statue of Theodore Dwight Woolsey on Old Campus. Actual students rarely do so.
In the second half of the twentieth century Bladderball, a campus-wide game played with a large inflatable ball, became a popular tradition but was banned by administration due to safety concerns. In spite of administration opposition, students revived the game in 2009 and 2011, but its future remains uncertain.

including the Yale Bowl.
Yale students claim to have invented Frisbee,

by tossing empty Frisbie Pie Company tins.

respective fields. Among the best-known are U.S. Presidents William Howard

Taft, Gerald Ford, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush.
U.S. Secretaries of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Cyrus Vance, and Dean Acheson.
lexicographer Noah Webster.
inventors Samuel F. B. Morse and Eli Whitney.
patriot and "first spy" Nathan Hale.
Academy Award winning actors and directors Paul Newman, Vincent Price, Meryl Streep, Jodie Foster, Frances McDormand, Angela Bassett, Elia Kazan, George Roy Hill, Oliver Stone, and Michael Cimino and others.

Drama class of 1975
President William Howard Taft, graduated from Yale

in 1878.