The schools referred to as “Ivy” league actually were initially part of an athletic conference, when a sportswriter called them “ivy schools” as he was writing about the football prowess at these schools as compared to other inter-collegiate competitors. Since then, these schools have become better known for their educational excellence than their sports programs and the name Ivy has evolved to mean educational elite.
The original ivy league schools were: Columbia, Yale, Harvard, Dartmouth, Brown, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania and Cornel. Others now considered Ivy (by the latter definition) include: Stanford, MIT and Duke.