Ivy League For Everyone / Live-Action TV

• 2 Broke Girls' Caroline Channing went to Wharton Business School (University of Pennsylvania).
• The Princeton episode of 8 Simple Rules embodied this trope. Bridget was the brainless one on the show ("Ivory League"), but to her family, all that stood between her and a full-ride athletic scholarship to Princeton was her being ineligible to play in the tennis match the scout was attending (the actual D grade itself that made her ineligible didn't concern them). The worst part was that her sister, a good student, was interested in Ivy League schools, yet never noticed that Bridget couldn't "just swing her tennis racket" and get into Princeton, since Princeton (and Ivy League schools in general) do not offer "athletic scholarships" and admittance solely on athletic ability.^note While the Ivy League does allow each member school to admit a limited number of students based on athletic ability, those students are required to have academic credentials that are at least reasonably close to those of the general student body.
• 24:
  • Bill Buchanan obtained his English degree from Brown University.
  • President Charles Logan graduated from Princeton University.
  • Audrey Raines, Jack Bauer's lover and Inter-Agency Liaison in the U.S. Department of Defense, has a degree in public policy from Brown.
  • Bauer himself has a B.S. from Berkeley and an M.S. from UCLA.
• 30 Rock's Jack Donaghy attended Princeton University as an undergraduate. This is once used for comedic effect when Jack tells Kenneth he doesn't have bedbugs because he went to Princeton.
  • Also, Twofer attended Harvard. (As did many a television comedy writer in Real Life.)
• Spoofed in a quiz on The Andy Milonakis Show. Before one commercial break, Andy says "Believe it or not, Andy has a diploma at Harvard Law. Find out the answer when we return!" But after the commercial break, "if you guessed that Andy has a diploma from Harvard Law, you are wrong.
• The title character of Ally McBeal attended Harvard Law School.
• General Michael Holden and Claudia Joy of Army Wives met while they were students at Harvard.
• The title character of Becker likes to boast that he got his degree from Harvard - which actually means that somewhere, sometime, something went horribly wrong for him.
• In The Beverly Hillbillies, Mrs. Drysdale's son Sonny mentions attending Princeton and Harvard and Yale. Pennants of the schools hang on his wall.
• On Blackish, Bow attended Brown University and Dre went to Howard University. Zoey subverts this and ends up going to a fictional California University. Junior plays it straight at first and gets into Howard, however he decides to take a gap year before going.
• Blue Bloods' Jamie Reagan graduated from Harvard Law School, then decided to turn cop after his brother Joe was killed in the line of duty. Deconstructed in one episode, where he moonlights as a house painter because he's having trouble keeping up his student loan payments on a beat cop's salary. His sister Erin attended Columbia University and her daughter Nicky has followed suit.
• In Bones, Dr. Saroyan gets her adopted daughter into Columbia behind her back when said daughter decides to follow her boyfriend to a tiny college in Maine.
• On Boy Meets World, a major plot line in the show's fifth season is that Topanga is accepted to Yale, which would inevitably separate her from her One True Love Cory, who was only accepted to the fictional Pennbrook in their native Philadelphia.^note Her attending the University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy which is actually in Philadephia, is never brought up, because — true to the trope — the writers don't appear to realize it exists. To be fair, Topanga only applied to Yale on a whim during the brief period she and Cory were broken up earlier in the year, but it beggars belief that a smart girl like Topanga who planned on staying local wouldn't apply to U.Penn. They discuss the possibility of a Long-Distance Relationship but Topanga decides not to go to Yale after all and instead proposes marriage to Cory, with the two of them attending Pennbrook together starting in the sixth season.
  • We later learn that Rachel made the exact same decision Topanga did - turning down Yale to attend Pennbrook with her boyfriend - which backfired on her when he dumped her and dropped out to move to Corpus Christi, Texas. (Both of them turn out okay, though - Topanga moves to New York City to accept an internship with a prestigious law firm and Rachel joins the Peace Corps after she graduates.)
• In Breaking Bad, Walter White and his friend and former business partner Elliot Schwartz were Caltech students.
• On Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Captain Holt's husband Kevin is a professor and department head at Columbia University.
• Justified in Buffy the Vampire Slayer with Willow's acceptance into Harvard, Yale, Oxford, etc., as she is consistently portrayed as The Smart Guy. In the end, she remains in town and settles for UC Sunnydale to help Buffy in her fight against evil.
  • Subverted when Willow is wooed by Wesleyan University. While a great school, it's not an Ivy — it's merely Joss Whedon's alma mater.
  • Cordelia gets accepted into several of the schools on this list, despite being the Alpha Bitch and a Cruel Cheerleader, because she does well on standardized testing. She tells Wesley in Angel that she was in the top 10% of her class. Cordelia is also reasonably intelligent despite being forthright and taking care to hide her studious side.
  • Buffy herself got into Northwestern, every bit as prestigious as many of the schools here.
    • Which is probably the most ridiculous part since Buffy was characterized as cutting a lot of class in high school and doing poorly as a result.
• In Charles in Charge, the main character gets accepted as a graduate student to Princeton.
• Charmed:
  • Subverted when Phoebe is attending college in seasons 2 and 3 (and later goes back in season 7). The name of her college is not mentioned. The show being set in San Francisco, the only time Berkeley is actually mentioned is when Phoebe's asking for fake directions. Given that she's implied to be a bit of a delinquent when she was a teenager, Phoebe would probably need a bit of magic to get into an Ivy League school.
  • Paige is said to have attended Berkley. While she was a Former Teen Rebel who was in a remedial class for a while, the deaths of her Muggle Foster Parents motivated her to buckle down, and she says she gets in thanks to high test scores and "a powerful essay" on said deaths.
• Chuck was thrown out of Stanford for cheating not really, and he got his degree eventually. Vivian Macarthur Volkoff was groomed to take over her father's villainous organisation after studying at the London School of Economics.
• Dartmouth College is the alma mater of the fictional host of The Colbert Report; the real Colbert graduated from Northwestern University.
• In Commander in Chief, former Communications Directors and current Press Secretary Kelly Ludlow, played by Ever Carradine, graduated from Princeton.
  • In one episode, a family uncovered a film (e.g., undeniable proof) of the Speaker of the House ranting against minorities. They offer it to President Allen in exchange for an acceptance to Brown University for one of their children (it is implied the child was not able to attend an Ivy League school without it). President Allen is able to secure an acceptance for them, then destroys the film, realizing that, while it would have been a major chip to hold over the SotH, he did not espouse these ideals and was only making a (badly influenced) political speech for a specific audience.
• In Community, Jeff Winger goes to Greendale Community College after the State Bar found out that his bachelor's degree from Columbia was actually from Colombia.
• On The Cosby Show, eldest daughter Sondra Huxtable attended Princeton, and she met her future husband Elvin Tibideaux there. Brother Theo attends NYU (not Ivy, but a well-known and excellent school in its own right). Cliff and Clair themselves are alums of the (fictional) historically black college Hillman College, based largely on the Real Life Howard University (the "Harvard" of historically black colleges). Their daughter Denise briefly attends the school (which becomes the initial premise of the Spin-Off A Different World), but dropped out as a result of Real Life Writes the Plot (actress Lisa Bonet became pregnant).
• Criminal Minds: Special Agent Emily Prentiss went to Brown, as is revealed in her first episode. Justified in-universe as she's not only extremely intelligent (speaking several languages) but the daughter of a US Ambassador.
  • Spencer Reid is said to have multiple degrees, bachelors and doctorates, from MIT, Caltech AND Yale. Garcia went to Caltech, and fans happily debate whether they would have attended at the same time.
• Daredevil (2015): Matt Murdock, Foggy Nelson and Marci Stahl all attended Columbia Law School. Matt and Foggy bow out of well-paying jobs at Landman & Zack to start their own firm in Hell's Kitchen. Marci stays at L&Z until most of the firm's partners are implicated in Wilson Fisk's criminal activities, and subsequently she moves over to Hogarth Chao & Benowitz, where Foggy joins her at the end of season 2.
• Sam Arsenault, guest villain on Damages, sings Danny Boy at a cocktail party and tells the guests he sang it with the Jabberwocks when he was an undergraduate student at Brown. The actor, James Naughton, was a member of the Jabberwocks and graduated from Brown in 1967 in Real Life.
• Later seasons of Degrassi: The Next Generation have turned into this, despite most Canadian students preferring Canadian universities if only because of lower tuition costs or not having to take the SATs to get acceptance to Canadian universities. Danny goes to Cornell (despite the fact that he didn't actually start doing well in school until Grade 12). Holly J. attends Yale. Clare is applying to Columbia.
  • While not Ivy League, a number of characters have been accepted to prestigious American schools. Later seasons have included Alli getting early acceptance to MIT, Jane and Katie both attending Stanford (despite Katie royally screwing up her senior year by leaving to attend rehab midway through it), and Eli headed for NYU.
  • Paige, Liberty, and Damian get accepted to fictional Banting, "the Harvard of the North". Justified with the latter two, as they tied for valedictorian and were student body presidents of their respective schools.
• In the season 4 finale of Desperate Housewives, Susan's daughter Julie Mayer is accepted to Princeton and prepares to leave home.
  • Bree's daughter Danielle ends up at Columbia even though the show stressed her stupidity for years.
• On Doogie Howser, M.D., main character Douglas Howser, boy genius, graduated from Princeton at the young age of 10.
• On Eureka, Zoe goes off to Harvard at the end of the third season.
  • Nearly every character aside from Sheriff Carter and Jo have a degree from the Ivy League or Oxbridge, but this is actually Justified given the premise.
• In Even Stevens, Louis and Ren's mother, Eileen Stevens, is an alumnus of Brown University.
• In Everwood, Amy Abbott is accepted to Princeton. She chooses to defer her first semester at Princeton so that she can take care of her mother while she recovers from her cancer.
• In The Fairly OddParents: Fairly Odder, Timmy Turner, the "straight-F" student somehow managed to get into Princeton University. He could have wished to get accepted, but fairy rules state that you cannot use magic to cheat. Though by this point in the franchise's history, Da Rules have been mangled into being whatever for the sake of the plot.
• In Family Matters, Laura Winslow is accepted to Harvard but ends up attending the cheaper local college Illinois Occidental University (IOU).
• In Family Ties, Alex P. Keaton spends the first two seasons preparing to attend Princeton. While visiting for an on-campus interview, his sister Mallory has an emotional crisis. Ultimately, Alex chooses to tend to her rather than complete his interview, thus destroying his chance of attending Princeton.
  • To compensate, the show created a fictitious university that looked suspiciously like Stanford in Ohio, complete with a tree mascot!
• Dr. Frasier Crane of Frasier and Cheers earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College. He also graduated from Harvard Medical School, where he obtained both his M.D. and Ph.D. in psychiatry. It's stated on the show that he also attended Oxford. Niles, the perpetual Always Second Best, went to Yale and Cambridge. Subverted by Donny Douglas, who got his law degree from "the University of Las Vegas", where Niles wryly comments that they would have no trouble finding tassels for those mortarboards. (At the time the episode aired, Vegas - indeed, the entire state of Nevada - had no law school. The Boyd School of Law at the University of Nevada Las Vegas, did not graduate its first class until 2001.)
• In The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Carlton Banks' dream school is Princeton University and he eventually attends the university at the end of the series. His father, Phillip, attended Princeton on scholarship, and went to Harvard Law School afterwards.
  • There's at least one Mention of Carlton wishing to attend Yale. Princeton only becomes his goal/dream after Philip informs him that's where he's going.
  • Also, it's worth mentioning that unlike most fictional characters, Carlton's aspirations aren't unrealistic. Between him being a legacy child (it's easier for children of alumni to get in, and Phil is a Princeton grad), his family being wealthy and well-connected, both in their community and in academia (Phil is a high-powered attorney and, later, judge, Vivian is a professor), and Carlton being shown to obsessively maintain a 4.0 GPA, his prospects for admittance are very good.
  • In one episode, Uncle Phil mentions that in addition to Princeton, he received scholarships to two other Ivies: Yale and Wharton (the latter a part of the University of Pennsylvania). This is consistent with his backstory as having grown up in poverty, so he would not have been able to afford any of these schools had they not provided him with needs-based scholarships, which they do offer in Real Life. Another character (who attended Penn State) snidely remarks that he must have been an athlete in his thinner days, but as noted none of the Ivies even offer athletic scholarships. Uncle Phil was admitted based on his excellent scholastic record and could afford it based on his financial need.
• Friday Night Lights subverts this. Getting a scholarship for any college is what most of the players aspire for in order to get ahead in life. Schools from all over the country will offer players a spot on their team and Ivy League schools don't offer sports scholarships. Julie and Landry, both portrayed as hard working students and smart, don't go to Ivy League schools (Julie attends the fictional Burleson College while Landry attends Rice University).
• Garth Marenghis Darkplace: one of the earliest signs of lack of care in the Show Within a Show of the same name is Liz Asher claimed to have gone to 'Harvard College, Yale'. Which is two separate locations. And it's unlikely (though not technically impossible) that the British Liz would have gone to America for higher learning. But considering Know-Nothing Know-It-All Garth Marenghi wrote/directed/starred in the script, he probably threw that in to make Liz sound qualified and smart. Not that Garth's ego and misogyny would let him write Liz using those smarts and overshadowing Dr. Rick Dagless, M.D..
• Ghosts (US): Isaac attended Dartmouth College and Trevor attended The University of Pennsylvania.
• Thurston Howell III of Gilligan's Island is a stereotypical WASP and a graduate of Harvard University. A running gag is his disdain for "Yale men". Mrs. Howell is an alumna of Vassar, one of the Seven Sisters, having attended college long before any of the Ivies admitted women.
• Gilmore Girls justifies and realistically portrays this trope. Through the first half of the series, Rory's ultimate goal is to get into Harvard and a major plot point is her move to the more academically challenging Chilton in order to improve her grades and participating in numerous extracurriculars to put on the her CV. When she gets into all of her schools, including Harvard and Yale. (Yale is especially believable as her grandfather Richard has a legacy there.) She chooses Yale in order to stay closer to home. ^note  Series creators Amy Sherman and Daniel Palladino met at Yale, so Harvard was a clever red herring they ran with for a few seasons while Rory was in high school. The equally high-achieving, Paris Geller is even more justified with the hyper-intensity she puts into her studies and extracurriculars, and also gets into Yale, but gets rejected from her life-long goal of Harvard, showing how competitive Ivy League application really is. Paris later gets accepted to Harvard in Season 7.
  • The less believable part of Rory's acceptance is while she's shown becoming Valedictorian / school vice-president / writer on the school paper / 4.0 GPA student, you have to ask how she has time to do it all, with all the scenes Rory spends inanely wasting time with her mother, in the diner, with boys, her grandparents, reading constantly and being a part of many quaint and massively time-consuming town events. With all that going on it's unlikely she would have gotten enough done to get in to an Ivy League school, much less three at once.
• Kurt and Rachel on Glee focus all of their energies in the third season on getting accepted at the fictional New York Academy of the Dramatic Arts ("NYADA"). They originally wanted to go to Julliard before being told it doesn't have a musical theater program. This storyline is related to the scrapped idea of creating a Spin-Off where they pursue their dreams in New York (which sort of happens later in season 5, despite not being a Spin-Off).
  • Glee had a variant on this with the storyline about about the Ohio State recruiter, Cooter Menkins, coming to McKinley to check out the members of the football team, and he was only interested in Shane. Finn acted like losing this shot meant he'd lost all chance of a football scholarship. The idea that he might get a football scholarship to a less competitive program, or going to college on financial aid, is never entertained.^note The Big Ten Conference, home to Ohio State, has four other members within a 200-mile radius of the show's setting of Lima, Ohio—Indiana, Michigan, Michigan State, and Purdue, with two others (Illinois and Northwestern) just outside it. Three other schools in the so-called "Power Five conferences" are within said radius, namely Kentucky, Louisville, and Notre Dame, with Pittsburgh just outside. In the so-called "Group of Five" conferences—a lower tier, but still in FBS football—there are even more options. Said 200-mile radius also contains Cincinnati, plus nine of the 12 members of the Mid-American Conference. Even the other three MAC members are only slightly outside that boundary.
  • A more direct example is Quinn. After realizing she might have a life after high school after all, she reveals that she plans on applying to Yale and was later accepted, without even considering any colleges in Ohio such as Case Western Reserve University if she wants something prestigious, where she could theoretically maintain a relationship with her daughter.
  • Not to mention that none of the main characters go to college in state and aside from Ohio State, not one in-state school is mentioned as an option despite the fact that Ohio has one of the highest number of colleges in the US. In fairness, many of the kids moved to New York and LA to pursue performing careers, but there's no reason why, say, Finn can't go to the open-admission University of Dayton on financial aid.
  • Lauren Zizes, after being Put on a Bus for all of the third season, returns for a single episode in the fourth, at the end of which she reveals that she's applying for a wrestling scholarship at Harvard. This is despite the fact that Ivy League schools rarely provide athletic scholarships. The show isn't even trying to be realistic anymore.
  • Tina gets accepted to Brown University after being waitlisted.
• Gossip Girl is a case where the trope is justified, as the characters go to the sorts of elite New York private schools which are known to be Ivy feeders:
  • Blair Waldorf considers the holy trinity among Ivy Leagues Schools to be Harvard, Princeton and Yale. She later refers to Princeton as a "trade school."
  • Nate, Serena and Blair all get into Yale University. Despite not wanting to attend Yale and also being a lackluster student, Nate gets accepted due to his grandfather's influence. Serena gets accepted for her socialite status. Yale later gets revokes Blair's acceptance for her manipulation of a teacher.
  • Nate Archibald goes to Columbia. His father, Howie Archibald, is an alumnus of Dartmouth.
  • Serena gets accepted to Brown University, but defers her enrollment.
  • Serena's mother attended Brown University. Her father went to Columbia University.
  • Both Serena and Blair later attend Columbia University in Season 4.
• Meredith Grey is frequently seen in t-shirts of her alma mater, Dartmouth College, in Grey's Anatomy. Shonda Rhimes, creator of the show, is a Dartmouth alumna, and often references the college in her scripts.
  • And then there's Christina who graduated top of her class at Stanford.
  • However this trope is also subverted. Derek Shepard, one of the most renowned neurosurgeons, is frequently shown wearing Bowdoin College shirts/sweatshirts. While Bowdoin is still an elite, private school, it is not nearly as widely known as the schools in this trope.
    • Not really a subversion; Addison and Derek met while they were both students at Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons.
    • Yes really, since the trope usually refers to undergraduate attendance.
• Carol Seaver of Growing Pains attends Columbia, though this is reasonable given Carol's established onscreen academic prowess; her slacker older brother Mike goes to a (fictitious) junior college instead.
• Notably averted on House - although the hospital the show is set in is the fictional Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital, and exterior shots are actually of the Frist Campus Center, there is no attempt to connect the setting to Princeton University, which doesn't have a med school.
• In How I Met Your Mother, Marshall Eriksen is a Law student at Columbia.
  • Before the start of the series, Ted, Marshall, and Lily all met at Wesleyan University, a highly prestigious New England school, during their first week at college.
  • Ted also becomes a professor of architecture at the end of season four. An especially egregious example, as the show depicts becoming a Columbia professor as a fallback for someone who can't manage to hold a job as an architect or get a building built, whereas in Real Life, you can't get a professorship at an Ivy League until you're already prominent in your field. Ted finally becomes slightly more prominent though with the GNB Building (he's even on the cover of New York Magazine because of it).
  • When Robin is attending court-mandated therapy, she reads her therapist's degrees off the wall and finds herself impressed by his having attended several prestigious universities, including Harvard.
  • Fairly late in the series, Barney claims to have gone to MIT. In the ninth and final season, he gets extremely drunk and starts compulsively telling the truth. Robin and Ted use the opportunity to ask him if he really went to MIT, which it turns out he did— "MIT" being an acronym for "Magicians Institute of Teaneck". He also got a perfect score on all the ACTs (Advanced Card Tricks).
• Dennis and Dee of It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia both attended University of Pennsylvania, despite the fact that they are complete idiots. However, they were wealthy and were possibly legacies. Dennis graduated. Dee did not.
  • The lawyer who serves as a recurring antagonist is a Harvard graduate.
• Though none of the main characters in JAG have law degrees from the Ivy League (Harm went to Georgetown, Mac went to Duke, and Bud went to George Mason), two recurring characters did: Caitlin Pike went to Harvard and Congresswoman Bobbi Latham graduated first in her class at Yale. It is never stated throughout the series from where Meg, AJ and Sturgis got their degrees.
• The title character of Judging Amy is a graduate of Harvard Law School.
• On The Killing, Councilman Richmond mentions that he met his late wife his sophomore year at Dartmouth.
• Sean Alvarez, an honest stock broker and murder victim on an episode of Law & Order, went to Brown.
• Dr. Jack Shephard of Lost is an alumnus of Columbia.
• Hit Korean romantic drama Love Story in Harvard is about two South Korean first-year Harvard Law School students and their romantic pursuit of a Korean student in her third year at Harvard Medical School.
• Luke Cage (2016): Had Cottonmouth not been pressured into being part of Momma Mabel's criminal enterprise, he probably would have ended up in the Julliard School, as he was a pretty talented musician.
• Bette Porter of The L Word got her degree in Art History at Yale. She also was a graduate student there. Her Ivy League education is supposed to showcase her intelligence, drive, and affluent background.
• Upperclass WASP-y Pete Campbell of Mad Men went to Dartmouth College.
  • The episode "My Old Kentucky Home" reveals that Paul Kinsey graduated from Princeton in 1955 and sang in the a cappella group, the Princeton Tigertones.
  • Ken Cosgrove attended Columbia University.
• Zigzagged in MacGyver (2016). Mac attended MIT for a while, but he never graduated - after a time, he got tired of looking at high level theoretical problems and wanted to do something practical with his life, so he dropped out of college, enlisted in the Army, and became an EOD tech. In season three he ends up receiving an honorary degree from a far less prestigious college in California after shutting down a terrorist recruitment ring on campus.
• Major Charles Emerson Winchester III of M*A*S*H graduated from Harvard College in 1939, where he lettered in Crew and Polo. He also received his medical degree from Harvard Medical School in 1943.
  • In one episode, a visitor to the Swamp asks Charles if he went to Yale. He immediately snaps, "HARVARD!" before regaining his composure and reiterating, "...Harvard."
  • Trapper John McIntyre is a Dartmouth alum, at least in the original novel and film.
• Ben Matlock, lead character of Matlock, worked for nine years before attending Harvard Law School, and therefore was significantly older than his law school classmates. He graduated from Harvard Law in 1967.
• Modern Family has Alex Dunphy applying to every prestigious, impossible-to-get-into school you could think of including Harvard, MIT, Caltech and Princeton. Subverted though in a season 6 episode when she learns she got rejected from Harvard; it causes her a brief crisis of confidence (as well as railing against the supposed unfairness of her lifelong work not paying off), but Hayley points out she should take it as the first instance of entering an academic world where she won't always be the best.
• Tim McGee of NCIS was an MIT grad - and was the school team's beaver mascot in his senior year.
• In Nip/Tuck, Julia McNamara's mother, Dr. Erica Noughton, graduated from Columbia with a Ph.D. in clinical psychology.
  • Sean also got accepted into Harvard Medical School, but the admission was rescinded when it was revealed that he failed a class because of cheating caused by Christian.
• On NUMB3RS, mathematical genius Charlie Eppes attended Princeton at age 13 for his undergraduate studies. He graduated when he was 16.
  • Larry Fleinhardt also went to Princeton and graduated when he was 19.
• Summer Roberts from The O.C. gets into Brown, despite not being characterized as a nerd.
  • Seth Cohen, The Smart Guy, however, doesn't get in, even though Brown was his dream school. He does get into RISD though (which itself carries Ivy League-level prestige for arts students), so the couple gets to stay close to each other.
  • Taylor Townsend attends the Sorbonne in Paris before her divorce.
• In The Office Andy Bernard constantly mentions his education at Cornell University and his participation in the (fictional) acapella group, Here Comes Treble. The unspoken joke of his character is that his Ivy League education got him a job as a mediocre salesman at a failing company in a dying industry. Andy having attended Cornell (the least prestigious of the Ivies) is, one suspects, because he tried and failed to get into the others.
  • In the episode "Job Fair", Jim brings Andy along golfing with a potential client because the client is an alumnus of Dartmouth.
  • In a deleted scene Andy claims to have "sang" his way into the school after he was wait-listed, and in another deleted scene it is mentioned that his father donated a building which is presumably how Andy even got onto the wait-list in the first place.
  • Dwight considers attending Cornell because of its agricultural program (and probably to take away Andy's main advantage over him) and gains an interview. It is notable that because of lower competition and state funding, Cornell's College of Agricultural and Life Science which Dwight presumably applied to, while selective, is significantly easier to get into then the other colleges at Cornell and has the reputation as a "backdoor" into the school, particularly if you grew up on a farm.
  • Its a subversion of how the trope is normally played as Andy seems to be the only character with an Ivy League background yet is one of the show's ditzier characters. But then, the show likes idiots with hidden depths of competence.
• In Oz, Tobias Beecher attended Harvard Law.
• Besides the original novel and subsequent film, The Paper Chase was also made into a television series. The show is about first-year Harvard Law student Hart and his experiences with the intimidating yet brilliant contracts Professor Charles Kingsfield.
• In Party of Five:
  • Sarah Reeves is accepted to Brown, though she chooses not to go. As the show takes place in San Francisco, Berkeley is mentioned quite a bit - though none of the main cast actually attend there. A one-episode character is in town because she's considering attending Berkeley but we never see her again.
  • When Claudia is looking around at colleges, she gets a tour of Yale and ends the series attending Juilliard. However, this is actually plausible, since she was a Child Prodigy with the violin
• Harold Finch of Person of Interest attended MIT under a false identity - not that "Harold Finch" is his real name either. One of his former classmates there ended up creating Samaritan, The Machine's Evil Counterpart.
• Averted in Pretty Little Liars, as neither Spencer nor Aria get into the ivy leagues they applied for, U Penn and Brown. However, played straight once again with Spencer, and Mona, Paige and Kate, as Spencer gets into Georgetown after a lot of uncertainty over where she would go, and Mona gets early admission for Harvard, Yale, Brown and Dartmouth, Paige goes to Stanford on a swimming scholarship, while Kate is mentioned to also get into Dartmouth.
• In Privileged, JoAnna Garcia Swisher's character is a Yale alum, and has been hired to get her employer's two daughters into Duke.
• The Punisher (2017): The file that David Lieberman pulls up on William J. "Bill" Rawlins III says that Rawlins went to Yale.
• In the Irish drama Raw Rebecca is a student at Trinity College, to emphasise how posh she is. And in season 3 when Maeve decides to take a course, she enrolls at Trinity as well.
• Riverdale: After their graduation, Betty went to Yale while Veronica went to Barnard College (an affiliation of Columbia) though the latter planned to attend Harvard at first but she declined her acceptance due to the influence of her father within. Subverted with Jughead who was accepted to Yale instead of Betty but his place was removed due to his Fake Death in Season 4.
• Jessie Spano from Saved by the Bell goes to Columbia. As she's a frequent Straight A Student and takes part in many teams and societies, it's pretty justified. Though she does have a meltdown when she only scores a 1205 on her SAT.
  • Zack Morris gets accepted into Yale, despite poor grades or a lack of academic interest, all because he scored high on the SAT. Of course in the spin-off Zack, Slater, Screech and eventually Kelly end up attending California University.
• Elliot Reid in Scrubs revealed that she was in a sorority at Brown University in the episode "My Turf War".
• Matt Camden and Sarah Glass, from 7th Heaven attend Columbia Medical together.
• Miranda Hobbes of Sex and the City got her law degree from Harvard. In one episode, she hides her educated background and pretends to be a flight attendant in order to get a date during a speed dating session because men are threatened by smart women.
• Two characters - Thomas and Pandora - get to Harvard at the end of series 4 of Skins, under highly implausible circumstances. Admittedly this trope crosses over with Small Reference Pools to rightpondians.
• Tony Soprano's daughter, Meadow, is an undergraduate student at Columbia in The Sopranos. However, in her case it's made clear that, while she was certainly a good student in high school, she was really not Ivy League caliber by merit and the only reason she was accepted to the college was because Carmela used Tony's reputation to "persuade" an acquaintance with connections to the admissions department to assist.
• Dan Rydell in Sports Night is a Dartmouth alumnus, a subject that is mentioned several times.
• Averted by Star Trek: The Original Series. Main character and resident cynic Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy got his doctorate at Ole Miss. Jim Kirk went to Iowa State if memory serves.
• On Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, another show written by Aaron Sorkin, Jordan (the new, unusually young head of the network) is a graduate of Yale Law School. In order to make it plausible that her character had time to go to law school and become a network head by her early-to-mid 30s, it was revealed that she was hired as the head of a major record label immediately upon graduating Yale Law — even though there was nothing in her resume that would qualify her for such a position. She wasn't the only character with a Yale degree, either. We were supposed to believe that Simon, one of the sketch comedy actors, attended Yale Drama School.
• On Succession, Kendall Roy and his frenemy Stewy Hosseini are Harvard graduates.
• This trope is part of the premise of Suits. The show takes place in a law firm that only hires graduates of Harvard Law. In the first season, much of the drama is focused on Mike Ross, a college dropout brilliant enough to pretend he has the necessary Harvard diploma.
• On Supernatural, Sam Winchester was attending Stanford University on a full scholarship before the demon Azazel interfered. Ash was kicked out of MIT for fighting (the specifics are not revealed), and he uses his knowledge of computers to run simulations and help hunters find patterns in the monsters' victimology.
• Taxi: Out of all the cabbies, Reverend Jim spent a year at Harvard... back when he was James Caldwell, scion of a distinguished New England family who suddenly becomes a drugged-out hippie once he eats a marijuana-laced brownie.
• Too Old to Die Young: Janey gets accepted to Harvard along with a number of other unnamed but presumably similarly prestigious universities. While she's fairly mature, strong-willed and well-spoken for her age, Janey never really comes across as very intellectual or knowledgeable. Ultimately her millionaire father convinces her to work with him instead of attend college.
• In Ugly Betty, Betty's boss, Mode Editor-in-Chief Daniel Meade, is an alumnus of Harvard, even though he is not particularly intelligent.
  • Averted with Betty herself, who attended Queens College in Flushing, Queens.
• In Weeds, Silas Botwin, the son of the main character, dates Megan, who is accepted to Princeton.
• In The West Wing, Abbey Bartlet, wife of President Josiah Bartlet and First Lady of the United States, received her M.D. from Harvard Medical School. (Bartlet himself chose Notre Dame over any Ivy League school, because until he met Abbey, he'd been thinking about becoming a priest, and his loyalty to the school comes up repeatedly. He also went to the London School of Economics, which plays into his background as a Nobel Prize-winning economist.)
  • Sam (see below for his educational bonafides) reacts angrily when Ainsley (who is largely playing devil's advocate for an anti-Ivy League position advocated by many Republicans) refers to Bartlet's Ivy League education. First, Notre Dame isn't in the Ivy League and second, why shouldn't we encourage kids to strive for an education at America's best universities? Ainsley agrees, as Sam knows she would.
  • Amy Gardner, women's rights activist and later the First Lady Abbey Bartlet's Chief of Staff, tells Abbey that she got her smart mouth at "Brown, and then Yale Law School."
  • Cliff Calley, Senate Majority Counsel, is an alumnus of Brown and Harvard.
  • Deputy White House Communications Director Sam Seaborn graduated magna cum laude from Princeton University. He makes repeated references to his alma mater, especially in the earlier seasons, indicating a certain pride in his attendance there. "Princeton" is his Secret Service code name, and he mentions being the recording secretary of the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society. His law degree is from Duke, and in one episode he recruits a Duke Law classmate to run in a Congressional election.
  • Ainsley Hayes went to Harvard. And Smith College, a bastion of liberal feminism, which comes up when she goes back to debate there regarding women's rights.
  • Josh Lyman went to Harvard and Yale, and he wants you to know that. His boasting on this before filling in for CJ during a daily press briefing counts as Pride Before a Fall.
  • Characters who didn't go to Ivy League schools went to similarly prestigious ones like Berkeley, Georgetown and Stanford. The exceptions are Toby, who went to City College of New York, and the too-clever Donna, who dropped out of the University of Wisconsin, but is surprisingly able to keep up with the intelligentsia around her, issue for issue, as if she's one of them. In reality, she's just an under-educated secretary. The case with Toby is an interesting one as Toby is generally portrayed as the smartest of the senior staff and the only one intellectually on par with Bartlet himself. Toby's less-than-prestigious university is likely a result of his far less privileged background than most of his colleagues.
• In What I Like About You Valerie Tyler attended Columbia. Holly applies to Columbia as well.
  • Henry Gibson, Holly's boyfriend, attended Princeton.
• In Will & Grace, Will Truman and Grace Adler met when they were students at Columbia University.
• Jaye Tyler, main character of Wonderfalls, is a recent Brown University graduate with a philosophy degree and holds a dead-end job as a sales clerk at a Niagara Falls gift shop.
• Special Agent Pete Lattimer from Warehouse 13 regularly wears his Dartmouth football shirt indicating he may be an alumnus.
• The X-Files :
  • Fox Mulder attended the highly prestigious Oxford University.
  • FBI Special Agent Monica Reyes studied folklore and mythology at Brown University.
• Castle:
  • Detective Beckett is a Stanford alum, but turned cop after graduating as a pre-law major. Her parents were both lawyers, which probably helped with the money issue.
  • Double Subverted with Alexis. She initially applies for early admission to Stanford, trying to follow her then-boyfriend there, but is rejected. She applies again the next semester and is accepted. But by that point she's broken up with the aforementioned boyfriend and ends up attending Columbia beginning in season 5. Justified here since Castle made millions writing mystery novels, though Alexis is an ambitious straight-A student who would almost certainly qualify for a full ride scholarship if they couldn't afford the tuition.
• In the finale of The Suite Life on Deck, Cody, The Smart Guy, does not get into Yale, however, his equally smart girlfriend, Bailey, gets in.
• Andre Lyon from Empire attended the University of Pennsylvania, one of the less-mentioned Ivies, but appropriate since the Lyons are from Philadelphia. He met his future wife Rhonda at this place.
• The Big Bang Theory has the premise of all the main characters (sans Penny) who are accomplished academic geniuses and from high end schools. Leonard went to Princeton, Howard went to MIT, Raj went to Cambridge and Amy went to Harvard.
• In Veep, President Selina Meyer attended Smith College.
• In Luke Cage (2016), Mariah mentions at a high-class dinner that she attended Howard University, where she met her late husband.
• In You (2018), Guinevere Beck, the girl who becomes the lead character's main obsession, graduated from Brown, where she also first met her trust-fund baby friends, including her best friend, Peach. Her boyfriend, Benji, went to Yale, while Joe himself, Love, and Forty apparently didn't go to college.
• On Life with Derek, both Casey and Derek are admitted to the prestigious Queen's University upon graduating high school. This isn't a stretch for Casey, who is class valedictorian, but it's very surprising that a slacker like Derek would gain admission. (Life with Derek is set in London, Ontario - a five-hour drive from the Queen's University campus in Kingston - and London is home to the University of Western Ontario, a notorious "party school" which is much more the kind of place Derek would actually want to attend.)

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