"New Ivy" gets used as loose shorthand for "a non-Ivy school that's basically just as good," but the term traces back to two specific, different media projects -- a 2006 Newsweek list and a Forbes list revived in 2024 -- and neither one is a fixed club with permanent members. Understanding where the label actually comes from, and how often it changes, matters more than the label itself.
Where the term comes from
Newsweek (in partnership with Kaplan) coined "New Ivies" in 2006, naming 25 schools -- including Carnegie Mellon, UNC Chapel Hill, Emory, and Notre Dame -- selected through admissions statistics and interviews with administrators, faculty, students, and alumni, explicitly framed around geographic diversity the actual Ivy League doesn't have. Forbes revived the term in 2024 with its own separate methodology and has published an updated list annually since, and it's the Forbes version that's driven most of the recent "[School] named a New Ivy" headlines from individual universities' own news offices.
How Forbes actually builds the list
The 2024 methodology, which the magazine has kept broadly consistent in subsequent years: start from 1,743 colleges with at least 4,000 students each, and explicitly exclude the eight traditional Ivy League schools plus a small "Ivy Plus" tier (Stanford, MIT, Duke, University of Chicago). From there, screen for selectivity -- roughly under a 20% admit rate at private schools and under 50% at public ones -- and for strong standardized testing among applicants who submitted scores (an average around 1482 SAT / 33 ACT among the finalists). That screen narrowed the field to 32 schools, which Forbes then ran through a survey of hiring managers to produce the final list of 20 -- 10 public, 10 private.
The survey result is the actual news hook behind the list, not the schools themselves: compared to five years earlier, 33% of surveyed employers said they were less likely to hire an Ivy League graduate, while 42% said they were more likely to hire a graduate of a public university -- a real, measurable shift in employer sentiment away from treating Ivy League status as the assumed top signal.
The 2024 list
Public (10): Binghamton University, Georgia Institute of Technology, University of Florida, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Maryland, University of Michigan, University of Texas at Austin, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Private (10): Boston College, Carnegie Mellon University, Emory University, Georgetown University, Johns Hopkins University, Northwestern University, University of Notre Dame, University of Southern California, Vanderbilt University, and Rice University.
Why the list isn't a permanent club
This is the part worth internalizing: Forbes rebuilds the list every year, and membership moves. By the 2026 edition -- the third annual list -- Johns Hopkins was removed not because it fell short of the bar, but because Forbes reclassified it into its separate "Ivy Plus" tier; the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Pittsburgh, and West Point dropped off entirely, while Case Western Reserve made its first appearance and the University of Florida returned after a cycle off the list. A school being a "New Ivy" one year and not the next doesn't mean its academics or outcomes changed -- it means a magazine's annual methodology, screening thresholds, and survey results shifted, the same caveat worth applying to any single ranking treated as a permanent verdict.
What this means for you
- "New Ivy" is a media label from a specific, named methodology (Newsweek in 2006, Forbes since 2024), not an official accreditation or a fixed list -- there's no governing body, the same caveat that applies to "Public Ivy" and other Ivy-adjacent informal terms.
- The list changes every year, sometimes for reasons that have nothing to do with a school getting better or worse -- Johns Hopkins left the 2026 list by being moved into a different Forbes-defined tier entirely, not by falling in quality.
- Use it the way you'd use any single ranking or list: as a starting point for schools worth a closer look, not as a substitute for checking the specific program, cost, and fit against real data yourself.
- The underlying signal worth paying attention to isn't the list itself -- it's the hiring manager survey behind it, which suggests employers are placing less unconditional weight on Ivy League branding than they used to.