"Are Ivy League schools afraid of diluting the brand name–Ivy League–if they acknowledge overlap schools beyond Stanford & MIT ? "
Why Harvard would think they’re diluting their brand because they list Amherst or Williams is beyond me. Same with Yale and say Wesleyan.
“Stanford University reports 5 Ivies as overlaps = Harvard, MIT, Duke, Yale, Penn, Princeton, Columbia, & USC.”
This is factually not right, if overlap is just number of applicants applying to both schools. More students apply to Stanford and Berkeley (UCLA probably as well) than Stanford and Duke or USC, maybe even MIT. About 17K apply to Stanford from CA, if just half of them apply to Berkeley, that’s more than most of the schools on Stanford’s overlap list. Especially the schools with ED (Duke, Penn, Columbia), no way they have more overlap than Berkeley or UCLA as many students don’t even reach Stanford RD.