Little Ivies

Locations of New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) schools, often described as "Little Ivies"

Little Ivies is an informal term, and not an official body, that has been used in the U.S. to compare small liberal arts colleges to the schools of the northeastern Ivy League in some way, usually in academic quality or in social prestige. While a definitive list of such schools does not exist, they are generally a loosely-defined group of small, selective^[1] American liberal arts colleges.

Institutions identified as Little Ivies are usually old, socially and academically elite, small, exclusive, and academically competitive liberal arts colleges located in the northeastern United States. The colloquialism is meant to imply that Little Ivies share similarities of distinction with the universities of the Ivy League.

• It is sometimes synonymous with the "Little Three," Amherst, Wesleyan, and Williams.^[2][3][4] (The term "Little Three" is well-defined as a former athletic league^[5][6][7] and has often been used to identify these schools as a socially and academically elite trio;^{[2][8][9][10][11]} the term has also been used to compare the three institutions with the so-called Big Three of the Ivy League: Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.^[12][13]) Encarta defines "Little Ivies" to refer to these three schools, which it characterizes as "small" and "exclusive" and as having "high academic standards and long traditions."^[14]
• It can refer to the academically competitive schools within the modern-day New England Small College Athletic Conference^[15](NESCAC), which includes the "Little Three" together with Bates, Bowdoin, Colby, Connecticut College, Hamilton, Middlebury, Trinity, and Tufts.
• Greene and Greene's guide, Hidden Ivies: Thirty Colleges of Excellence refers specifically—in its introduction—to "the group historically known as the 'Little Ivies' (including Amherst, Bowdoin, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Wesleyan, and Williams)" which it says have "scaled the heights of prestige and selectivity and also turn away thousands of our best and brightest young men and women."^[16][17]

Schools include

Schools that are known as "Little Ivies" include:

Institution	Location	Little Three	Greenes' Guides "Little Ivies"[16][18]	NESCAC	Class of 2017 Acceptance Rate[19]	Notes
Amherst College	Amherst, Massachusetts				13.7%	Founding NESCAC member.
Bates College	Lewiston, Maine				23.7%
Bowdoin College	Brunswick, Maine				14.5%	Founding NESCAC member.
Bucknell University	Lewisburg, Pennsylvania				29.5%	Competes athletically in the Patriot League.
Colby College	Waterville, Maine				26.0%
Colgate University	Hamilton, New York				26.0%	Competes athletically in the Patriot League.
Hamilton College	Clinton, New York				23.9%
Haverford College	Haverford, Pennsylvania				23.3%	Competes athletically in the Centennial Conference.[20][21][22][23]
Middlebury College	Middlebury, Vermont				19.0%
Swarthmore College	Swarthmore, Pennsylvania				14.1%	Competes athletically in the Centennial Conference.[20][21][23][24]
Trinity College	Hartford, Connecticut				31.1%
Tufts University	Medford, Massachusetts				17.2%	No longer a small liberal arts college; a "research university" with approximately 10,000 students (about 5,000 undergraduates and 5,000 graduates).[25]
Vassar College	Poughkeepsie, New York				23.1%	Competes athletically in the Liberty League.
Wesleyan University	Middletown, Connecticut				19.4%	Founding NESCAC member.
Williams College	Williamstown, Massachusetts				16.9%	Founding NESCAC member.

History

Founding of the institutions

Note Founding dates and religious affiliations are those stated by the institution itself. Many of them had complex histories in their early years and the stories of their origins are subject to interpretation. See footnotes for details where appropriate. "Religious affiliation" refers to financial sponsorship, formal association with, and promotion by, a religious denomination. All of the "Little Ivies" are private and not currently associated with any religion.

Related colleges

The schools of the Seven Sisters, historically women's colleges, could be considered a counterpart of the Little Ivies. Schools in this group are occasionally described as "little Ivies" themselves; for example, the Business Times of Singapore mentions "Amherst, Williams, Smith, Wesleyan and Swarthmore" as examples,^[1] and Greenes' Guides, illustrated in the chart above, ranks Vassar among the "little Ivies".

Examples of use

• The New York Times, February 10, 1955, p. 33 quotes the President of Swarthmore, describing and decrying social snobbery: "We not only have the Ivy League, and the pretty clearly understood though seldom mentioned gradations within the Ivy League, but we have the Little Ivy League, and the jockeying for position within that."
• Harvard Magazine
• Associate Justice Kennedy
• Episcopal High School of Houston
• Midwest Elite Hockey League
• The Williams Club
• The Atlantic Monthly: "Swarthmore, Amherst, Williams"
• Tamalpais Union High School District: "Amherst, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Haverford, Middlebury, Swarthmore, Trinity, Tufts, Wesleyan, and Williams."
• Boston Globe, September 20, 1985, p. 36 refers to "The New England Small College Athletic Conference (alias NESCAC or the 'Little Ivies')".
• "'Little Ivies' big lure for black scholars", Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 29, 2006: mentions Amherst, Middlebury, Holy Cross, Bowdoin, Hampshire as "colleges [that] are sometimes known as 'little Ivies,' because they have the image of exclusivity typical of Ivy League schools."
• The Observer of Case Western Reserve University equates the "Little Ivy League" with the NESCAC ("Mentoring program links faculty and student athletes", Matt Cannan September 22, 2006).

See also

• Colby-Bates-Bowdoin
• Little Three
• NESCAC
• Quaker Consortium
• Black Ivy League — informal list of colleges that attracted top African American students prior to the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s
• Hidden Ivies: Thirty Colleges of Excellence
• Jesuit Ivy — Complementary use of "Ivy" to characterize Boston College
• Public Ivies — Group of public U.S. universities thought to "provide an Ivy League collegiate experience at a public school price"
• Seven Sisters — Historically, these were women's colleges each of which had a close tie to an Ivy League (then, men-only) school.
• Southern Ivies — Complimentary use of "Ivy" to characterize excellent universities in the U. S. South

References