[Mystic]

Who or what are ivies?

The Ivy league - Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown, University of Pennsylvania

They're eight of the oldest universities in the country, and have "connotations of academic excellence, selectivity in admissions and social elitism."

More importantly, they have ridiculously high financial endowments so they all have a lot of research going on and end up being ranked pretty well around the world.