Black Ivy League in each of its institutions, including faculty holding endowed professorships, head athletic coaches, deans, and one president, Ruth Simmons (Dillard graduate) of Brown University. From 1967 to 1976, black enrollment in Ivy League colleges rose from 2.3% to 6.3%. In addition, Ivy League alumni who are African-American have formed the Black Ivy Alumni League, as well as separate black alumni groups for each individual university. The Black Ivy Alumni League notes that "over 50,000 alumni of African descent connected through our Ivy League experiences." African Americans who earned undergraduate degrees at Ivy League schools include President Barack Obama; his wife,
Ivy League five Quakers, four Congregationalists, and five Episcopalians. Cornell has been strongly nonsectarian from its founding. "Ivy League" is sometimes used as a way of referring to an elite class, even though institutions such as Cornell University were among the first in the United States to reject racial and gender discrimination in their admissions policies. This dates back to at least 1935. Novels and memoirs attest this sense, as a social elite; to some degree independent of the actual schools. After the Second World War, the present Ivy League institutions slowly widened their selection of their students. They had always had