Is Stanford Ivy League?

South of San Francisco and north of San Jose, Stanford University rests in a hallowed nook off the California coast. At over 8,000 acres, its Mission-style campus is among the largest in the U.S. and is populated with a huge set of sculptures by Auguste Rodin.

Stanford University has a reputation for luxury: The Stanford Golf Course rests in the foothills above campus. The school is also synonymous with California entrepreneurialism. Stanford faculty and graduates built the local tech industry today known as Silicon Valley.

Stanford is linked to the birth of the internet itself, not to mention the creation of Yahoo, Google, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Snapchat. The university also produces powerful alumni, including Nobel and Pulitzer laureates, a U.S. president (Herbert Hoover, who briefly majored in geology), and the current British prime minister, Rishi Sunak.

While Stanford is not in the Ivy League, the institution’s reputation has grown so great as to supplant the Ivies at the top of college rankings. U.S. students and parents have named Stanford the number-one dream college for much of the past decade.

Stanford does not belong to the Ivy League — that pack of New England universities that includes centuries-old colleges like Harvard and Yale — but it is the most elite university on the West Coast, topping any list of public Ivies and Ivy equivalents.

While the U.S. has no shortage of big-name universities that vie for Ivy status, Stanford may deserve the comparison the most. Stanford’s founders modeled the school after its East Coast forebearers, particularly Cornell University.

Cornell, the youngest of the Ivy League colleges, was founded just 20 years before Stanford. At Stanford’s opening, the school was hailed as the “Cornell of the West,” with the majority of faculty hailing from the New York Ivy, including Stanford’s first two presidents.

East Coast Harvard and West Coast Stanford lord over the nation’s colleges, splitting honors like top rankings, biggest endowments, and most decorated alums. While Harvard retains its old boys’ club significance, Stanford has new-world weight.

The public University of California, Berkeley, is somewhat less prestigious, with lower in-state fees and a larger student population. That said, Berkeley has even more Nobel laureates on faculty and a slate of STEM programs that go shoulder-to-shoulder with Stanford’s.

The University of California, Los Angeles, is another one of California’s leading public universities. Its urban setting and big student population differ from Stanford’s small and secluded scene; both offer strong science curricula. UCLA is at the top of most rankings but still trails behind Stanford.

In the 1960s, just as tech started to boom in the Bay Area, Stanford began appearing on college top 10 lists. As the decades passed, Stanford’s innovation and academics revolutionized the aims of U.S. higher education. Today, that entrepreneurial superpower makes Stanford just as good, if not better, than the Ivy League by many measures.