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.
Black Ivy League First Lady Michelle Obama; college basketball coaches Craig Robinson (also Michelle Obama's brother) and John Thompson III; and former Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Samuel Pierce. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas earned his bachelor's degree at a non-Ivy school, but earned his J.D. at Yale Law School. In 2004, the Institute for Research in African-American Studies (IRAAS) at Columbia University sponsored an academic conference entitled "Growing Black Ivy" which drew 200 scholars to discuss black participation at elite Ivy League institutions. Competition for top students have grown more intense. For example, Cornell announced a change in its financial aid