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 are need-based (financial aid). In addition, the Ivies have a rigid policy against redshirting, even for medical reasons; an athlete loses a year of eligibility for every year enrolled at an Ivy institution. Ivy League teams' non-league games are often against the members of the Patriot League, which have similar academic standards and athletic scholarship policies (although unlike the Ivies, the Patriot League allows redshirting). In the time before recruiting for college sports became dominated by those offering athletic scholarships and lowered academic standards for athletes, the Ivy League was successful in many sports relative to other universities in the