Ivy League colleges and universities in close up

What is Ivy League?
The Ivy League is an athletic conference 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.

Location
Brown University - Providence, Rhode Island
Columbia University - New York 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

Some facts
Established in 1954.
It is called Ivy League because of 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

Harvard

Harvard University is an American private Ivy League research 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.

Learning at Harvard
Harvard contributes to society through two primary activities — 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.

Freshman Year
Each student's plan of study is individualized, guided in 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.

Living at Harvard
Harvard guarantees housing all four years.
During their 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.

Living at Harvard

Beyond the Classroom
Extracurricular opportunities at Harvard are virtually limitless with 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.

Beyond the Classroom

Libraries
By a wide margin, Harvard's library system, with more than 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.

Libraries

Yale University

Motto in English: «Light and truth»
Founded in 1701 in the 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.

Administration and organization
The President and Fellows of Yale College, also 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.

Campus
Yale is noted for its largely Collegiate Gothic campus as 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

Campus
Interior of Beinecke Library
Statue of Nathan Hale in front of Connecticut Hall

Collections
Yale University Library, which holds over 12 million volumes, is 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

Residential colleges
Jonathan Edwards College
Davenport College

Traditions
Yale seniors at graduation smash clay pipes underfoot to symbolize 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.

Athletics
Yale supports 35 varsity athletic teams.
Yale has numerous athletic facilities, including the Yale Bowl.
Yale students claim to have invented Frisbee, by tossing empty Frisbie Pie Company tins.

Notable alumni and faculty
Yale has produced alumni distinguished in their 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.

Notable people
Academy Award Winning Actress Meryl Streep, Yale School of Drama class of 1975
President William Howard Taft, graduated from Yale in 1878.