<p>Travel costs would be ridiculous and in the case of Northwestern, way too many pre-professional majors at the undergrad level leading to a difference in fit and mission with the core Ivy Group. Georgetown and Duke are the right fits.</p>
<p>Carnegie Mellon beat ND in 1933 & 1937 too, but certainly doesn't fit with that level of sports anymore. Of all the reasons to not include Northwestern, being too pre-professional wouldn't be one of them to me. It certainly seems in line with Cornell and Penn from that standpoint. </p>
<p>I still like the idea of Colgate and Holy Cross - schools in close geographic proximity with the tradition of already actually consistently playing the Ivy schools in sports. In practice, I think it's fine how it is with the current eight schools. The Ivy League wasn't designed, nor should it be, the schools 1-8 (which are debatable anyway) of academic superiority in the country.</p>
<p>"way too many pre-professional majors at the undergrad level leading to a difference in fit and mission with the core Ivy Group."</p>
<p>-Have you ever seen the University of Pennsylvania?????</p>
<p>And don't forget Cornell.</p>
<p>(This really doesn't seem to be a concern for the Ivy League schools, otherwise, they never would have proceeded down the path of NU possibly joining as the 9th school in the mid-80's).</p>
<p>I'd love to see any shred of hard evidence to any of these "claims" about other schools who were supposedly courted to join the Ivies (e.g. NU, Colgate, etc.)</p>
<p>Coincidentally, they all have the same kind of story and outcome, "yeah, they wanted us to join back in the day, but we decided it just wasn't for us..."</p>
<p>The irony here is, of course, that any and all of these unsubstantiated claims of rejecting a chance to join the Ivies serves the larger purpose of highlighting any kind of association with the Ivies in the first place (regardless how marginal or unsubstantiated).</p>
<p><em>amused</em></p>
<p>Colgate and Holy Cross simply don't have comparable academics to the League. A simple example is the current population of Harvard Law School. Colgate has one person at HLS and Holy Cross 0. Georgetown has 33 and Duke 55. Fine schools but the student bodies need to be similar as this example illustrates.</p>
<p>If you are going to look at elite professional schools, just use the WSJ feeder rankings which has 15 top professional schools and look at the placement in that...Duke is ranked in the top 10 with most of the Ivy League, Georgetown I believe is top 20, Holy Cross and Colgate aren't near the top at all...</p>
<p>
[quote]
I'd love to see any shred of hard evidence to any of these "claims" about other schools who were supposedly courted to join the Ivies (e.g. NU, Colgate, etc.)
[/quote]
This Daily</a> Dartmouth story indicates that Colgate did participate in the initial talks that led to the formation of the Ivy League, but dropped out before the League was formally established.</p>
<p>Vassar students and faculty literally did turn down the opportunity to join the Ivy League in 1969. Yale proposed to go co-ed through merger with Vassar, but the Vassar community declined.</p>
<p>MIT historically rejected multiple offers to merge with Harvard, and Rutgers historically rejected an offer to merge with Princeton. In these cases, however, the proposed mergers occurred long before the "Ivy League" was established.</p>
<p>As far as I know, all other claims that "my school was invited to join the Ivy League" have no factual basis.</p>
<p>Duke and Vanderbilt</p>
<p>
[quote]
Colgate University was initially interested in being included in the agreement, but talks ended before the Dickey approved the 1945 agreement.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Yeah, I don't doubt that they were interested. That hardly means that the other schools felt the same way. It also indicates that they actually weren't even involved in the talks so what are we really talking about when Colgate claims anything substantial here except a school on the outside looking in?</p>
<p>That's interesting about Vassar. Where did you hear that? I did not know that they were formally invited - are there any links on that, I'd be interested in reading more about that. </p>
<p>Merger discussions are certainly valid (and had one gone through with one of the 8 schools would certainly be a "backdoor" way in), however for this particular discussion, doesn't really mean they were approached to be invited.</p>
<p>Holy Cross and Colgate have played the Ivies in most sports for well over 100 years-great tradition. As example HC has played Harvard 60 times in football alone and this year Holy Cross plays Harvard, Brown, and long time rival Dartmouth. Colgate has long series with Cornell and Princeton. While HC and Colgate are LAC's with enrollments less than half of most of the Ivies, both schools have more loyal sports alumni than the Ivies(Dartmouth-as possible exception).</p>
<p>
[quote]
That's interesting about Vassar. Where did you hear that? I did not know that they were formally invited - are there any links on that, I'd be interested in reading more about that.
[/quote]
You can read plenty more about the proposed Yale-Vassar merger [url=<a href="http://faculty.vassar.edu/daniels/1966_1967.html%5Dhere%5B/url">http://faculty.vassar.edu/daniels/1966_1967.html]here[/url</a>].
[quote]
President Kingman Brewster, Jr., of Yale said: 'I am very pleased that Vassar has accepted our invitation to a joint study. The Yale Corporation made it known last March that if further study indicated that Yale could make a contribution to the education of women at the college level, the coordinate college approach would be preferable to any expansion of Yale College to accommodate women.' </p>
<p>'The opportunity to explore these possibilities with Vassar College is a great privilege for Yale."
[/quote]
</p>
<p>
[quote]
You can read plenty more about the proposed Yale-Vassar merger here.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>...well, that's an interesting side-note of history between Vassar and Yale, but it doesn't mention anything about Vassar joining the Ivies at large...</p>
<p>The impression I get from reading is that it was difficult to get schools to join a conference that was going to de-emphasize football and it wasn't a matter of the Ivy League rejecting Colgate. It was a matter of which schools would be willing to drop big-time football, not what its SAT avg was (which only existed for ~ 10 years at that point). Further, from the older members on this board and general reading and knowledge and seeing older relatives' applications, Colgate was considered a stronger academic school than Brown until the 1970's; so this wouldn't be the reason either and was not specifically what the Ivy League was trying to do. That is only done on forums like this where people don't have any appreciation of the history of its establishment and purpose. Actually, Colgate and Brown had a history of playing each other the last game of every season from the 1920's through the early '60's despite the implementation of the Ivy League schedule in 1956. </p>
<p>While I have seen no evidence of Northwestern attempting to join the Ivy League, they were certainly known for futility for football in the '80's and did, indeed, play Princeton (a 37-0 victory) in 1986. However, Colgate played Duke in 1991 and this didn't mean they were attempting to join the ACC.</p>
<p>Rutgers makes the most sense, historically.</p>
<p>Let's take a look at what schools the Ivies themselves consider a best-fit into their conference. Here are the non-conference football games scheduled by Harvard, Yale, and Princeton for 2006:</p>
<p>Harvard:
Holy Cross, Lehigh, Lafayette
Yale:
San Diego, Lafayette, Lehigh
Princeton:
Lehigh, Lafayette, Colgate.</p>
<p>In other words, of 9 non-conference games, 8 of them are scheduled against Patriot League teams. You will find a similar conclusion if you look at the schedules of the remaining Ivies.</p>
<p>To further rogracer's point for football schedule of non-conference games.</p>
<p>Dartmouth:
Colgate, New Hampshire, Holy Cross
Cornell:
Bucknell, Albany, Colgate
Brown:
Rhode Island, Georgetown, Holy Cross
Penn:
Lafayette, Villanova, Bucknell
Columbia:
Fordham, Georgetown, Iona</p>
<p>I agree historically Rutgers makes sense. In fact, I think the first college football game ever played was between Princeton and Rutgers. But now, Rutgers is ~ 4x the size of the average Ivy with academic quality of the student body that isn't really close to comparable.</p>
<p>It depends on the sport, though. And, at Cornell many years ago at least, football was not the big sport. They played it, but most people didn't care much.</p>
<p>For hockey they played schools like: Colgate, RPI, Clarkson, U Vermont, Bowling Green, BU, plus most but not all of the Ivies.</p>
<p>For lacrosse they played schools like: UVA, UMD, Johns Hopkins, William & Mary I think.</p>
<p>Those sports captured more attention on-campus than football did, at the time.</p>
<p>monydad, I'm not sure what time period you're referring to, but Cornell seems to have a rich football tradition throughout its history and think that's why it was included in the Ivy League despite being so much younger than all the other schools. Cornell won national championships in football in 1915 & 1921 and Ed Marinaro even finished a close second in the Heisman Trophy vote of 1971. Hockey, on the other hand, wasn't even played competively at Cornell until 1964 with the arrival of former RPI coach, Ned Harkness, who transformed them quickly.</p>
<p>Thanks for rounding out the list gellino. So, 75% (18 of 24) of Ivy non-conference games are scheduled against Patriot League opponents. Football competition among schools with similar academic missions, by the way, was the original motivation for the Ivy formation in the first place. Patriot League schools are now in best alignment with that original vision.</p>