College admissions in the United States in the context of "SAT"

The Ivy League is an American collegiate athletic conference of eight private research universities in the Northeastern United States. It participates in the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I, and in football, in the Football Championship Subdivision (FCS). The term Ivy League is used more broadly to refer to the eight schools that belong to the league, which are globally renowned as elite colleges associated with academic excellence, highly selective admissions, and social elitism. The term was used as early as 1933, and it became official in 1954 following the formation of the Ivy League athletic conference. At times, they have also been referred to as the "Ancient Eight".

The eight members of the Ivy League are Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, and Yale University. The conference headquarters is in Princeton, New Jersey. All of the "Ivies" except Cornell were founded during the colonial period and therefore make up seven of the nine colonial colleges. The other two colonial colleges, Queen's College (now Rutgers University) and the College of William & Mary, became public institutions.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, 600 U.S. 181 (2023), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court ruling that race-based affirmative action programs in most college admissions violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. With its companion case, Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, the Supreme Court effectively overruled Grutter v. Bollinger (2003) and Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which validated some affirmative action in college admissions provided that race had a limited role in decisions.

In 2014, Students for Fair Admissions (SFFA) sued Harvard University in U.S. District Court in Boston, alleging that the university's undergraduate admission practices violated Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by discriminating against Asian Americans. In 2019, a district court judge upheld Harvard's limited use of race as a factor in admissions, citing lack of evidence of "discriminatory animus" or "conscious prejudice".

Need-blind admission in the United States refers to a college admission policy that does not take into account an applicant's financial status when deciding whether to accept them. This approach typically results in a higher percentage of accepted students who require financial assistance and requires the institution to have a substantial endowment or other funding sources to support the policy. Institutions that participated in an antitrust exemption granted by Congress were required by law to be need-blind until September 30, 2022.

Many colleges and universities cannot provide enough financial aid to cover all admitted students. Some institutions are not need-blind, while others may practice need-blind admissions, but cannot provide sufficient aid. Additionally, some schools that use need-blind admissions for domestic first-year students may not extend that policy to international or transfer students. Need-blind schools tend to be selective, due to the large number of applications they receive.