Ivy League

I had the impression that an Ivy League school in America meant a certain academic excellence classification. It turns out to be the name used for private schools in an area. It is just an athletic conference in the Northeaster United States. They are all very old universities and have connotations of elitism. I was shocked to find out that it wasn't a scholarly distinction, and that all these schools are so close together, and so close to here. Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Princeton, University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. So it means that other great schools like Duke or Stanford aren't actually Ivy League.