The Ivy League

Disclaimer: A college admissions expert I interviewed today (more about this later) agreed strongly when I asked if it wouldn't be crazy for a Californian not to consider the Univerity of California and California State University systems first off.

But that said: The Ivy League is one of those household names that everyone is clearly supposed to know, so any of us who didn't really know what that was all about might not necessarily speak up to ask.

Here's Wikipedia's definition, which in this case seems pretty safe:

The Ivy League is an athletic conference comprising eight private institutions of higher education located in the Northeastern United States. The term is now most commonly used to refer to those eight schools considered as a group. The term has connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions, and a reputation for social elitism.

The Ivy League schools:
Brown University, Providence, R.I.
Columbia University, New York, N.Y.
Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.
Dartmouth College, Hanover, N.H.
Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
Princeton University, Princeton, N.J.
University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pa.
Yale University, New Haven, Conn.

Note: Even though the University of California is public, the University of Pennsylvania is private. And it's not to be confused with Penn State, which is "state-related."