Ivy League is the name generally used to denote eight universities in the United States: Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton, and Yale. Over the years, these eight universities have shared common interests in scholarship as well as athletics. Stanley Woodward, New York Herald Tribune sports writer, coined the phrase in the early 1930s.

The term Ivy League has also obtained the connotation of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and social elitism.