Ivy League in Film
College admission letters are coming out. Julia was showing me Harvard’s acceptance statistics for the city of San Francisco. Two things struck me:
- I’m glad I don’t have to apply to college (too competitive)
- Good thing I’m not a millennial (too many of ‘em)
Harvard University accepted 2,037 students from 39,041 applicants. The admissions rate for the class of 2020 is 5.2%. Yikes. Without going into too much detail, it looks like about 0.5% of the freshman class could be from San Francisco, with another handful of SF seniors waitlisted, 😞.
This got me thinking about colleges, school rankings, notoriety, and public opinion. I wondered how popular culture perpetuates these notions, and potentially provides a “free” platform for earned media at the very least.
I started running some queries in Yarn for “Ivy League” and for each school to see how many times they appeared in movies and tv shows. The Ivy League is made up of eight institutions, Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, UPenn, Princeton, and Yale…for this post I’ll add MIT, since I’m biased.
Brown University
Ok, Brown is a bit generic. I found 12 Yarns for “Brown University” or “Brown”. I didn’t look through all of the “brown” references (>1,000). Here are a few.
Varsity Blues
“Brown” is tough. Here is a correct reference from My Best Friend’s Wedding:
And and incorrect, but great, one from Bob’s Burgers:
Columbia
We have 15 references to Columbia or Columbia University. There are many more, but those refer to Columbia (the country), British Columbia, The District of Columbia, Columbia High, Columbia House, Columbia Inn, etc.
Spider-Man is a fan of Columbia:
and so is James Franco from The Interview:
Cornell
I found 11 Yarns for Cornell. Several from the Perfect Score:
But also, Dirty Dancing:
and American Psycho:
Dartmouth
Has 10. Mostly from a few Gossip Girl Episodes (although, everyone really knows Nate really wanted to go to USC).
UPenn
Unfortunately, we don’t have any UPenn Yarns. We do have Penn State (7 items), sorry Quakers. I also tried Penn and University of Penn, but nothing there. I didn’t want to parse through all of the “Pennsylvania” Yarns, there were just too many items like: “I won the Pennsylvania lottery in the morning”.
Princeton
There are a lot of Princeton Yarns, 30 currently, from many different movies including Risky Business:
and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo:
Yale
Yale has 45 Yarns across 21 different movies. Including, Lost in Translation:
Moneyball
Dead Poets Society
Harvard
It’s the number one university in the eyes of the public. “Harvard” is referenced in a lot of movies, currently we have 161 Yarns across 45 movies. Including, 46 from The Social Network:
19 from How High:
18 from Legally Blonde:
and many others.
MIT
I looked for MIT and M.I.T. and found 14 Yarns, but interestingly none for “Massachusetts Institute of Technology”.
Several techie shows like Hackers:
Iron Man
and who could forget Tobias Fünke in Arrested Development (24.905):
Finally, since we’re in the Bay Area, I’ll also mention the elephant/tree in the room, I found 29 Yarns for Stanford:
Let me know if your alma mater shows up in Yarn, or point me to some other movies that have good collegiate references.
