Ivy League of a typical private liberal arts college and smaller than a typical public state university. Total enrollments, including graduate students, range from approximately 6,400 at Dartmouth to over 20,000 at Columbia, Cornell, Harvard, and Penn. Ivy League financial endowments range from Brown's $3.5 billion to Harvard's $34.5 billion, the largest financial endowment of any academic institution in the world. The Ivy League has drawn many comparisons to other elite grouping of universities in other nations such as Oxbridge and the Golden Triangle in the United Kingdom, C9 League in China, Group of Eight in Australia, and Imperial Universities in Japan.
Ivy League was formally designated as "Ivy Day" in 1874. Ivy planting ceremonies are reported for Yale, Simmons, Bryn Mawr and many others. Princeton's "Ivy Club" was founded in 1879. The first usage of "Ivy" in reference to a group of colleges is from sportswriter Stanley Woodward (1895–1965). The first known instance of the term "Ivy League" being used appeared in "The Christian Science Monitor" on February 7, 1935. Several sportswriters and other journalists used the term shortly later to refer to the older colleges, those along the northeastern seaboard of the United States, chiefly the nine institutions with origins dating from