Ivy League For Everyone / Live-Action Films

• In 21, MIT senior math major Ben Campbell is accepted into Harvard Medical School but cannot afford the $300,000 cost. Even though he has a high 44 MCAT score and a 4.0 GPA, Ben faces heavy competition for the prestigious Robinson Scholarship, which would give him a full ride through medical school. He uses the story of the film to impress Harvard officers and to stand out from the other well-qualified applicants. The film is based on the MIT Blackjack Team, who were from MIT and Harvard.
• Averted in Accepted, where it's a plot point that one of the main characters emphatically did not get into Yale. She expected to be a shoo-in and hadn't applied anywhere else. However, another student from the same high school as the protagonists did get into Princeton.
• In Across the Universe (2007), Jude befriends Max Carrigan, a rebellious student at Princeton. Max and his friends' upper class and wealthy families pay for their schooling while they spend their time drinking, smoking marijuana, and pulling pranks. Max's attendance at Princeton allows him to avoid the draft of The Vietnam War. When he drops out though...
• Averted, if not actively defied, to near-comical levels in the 2013 comedy Admission. The film is from the perspective of a Princeton admissions officer (Tina Fey) and deals with the subject pretty realistically. The mountain of the applicants, while amazing students, don’t really have stand-out résumés and are quickly rejected, while the handful that do get in have GPAs well above 4.0, exceptional extracurriculars, are class presidents/valedictorians, etc. The reason behind the many rejections is mainly because Princeton wants to keep its top spot as the most selective college. The one candidate that Fey vouches for more than anyone (believing he’s her long-lost son) is a Child Prodigy and even he gets rejected due to a prior D average. He winds up getting in only because Fey switches his rejected sticker with that of an accepted candidate who chose to go to Yale and loses her job as a result.
• In American Pie, Vicky Lathum (Tara Reid) is accepted into Cornell University which complicates things with her boyfriend Kevin (Thomas Ian Nicholas) who's going to the University of Michigan and contemplates a Long-Distance Relationship.
• Patrick Bateman of American Psycho went to Harvard University and Harvard Business School. It's also mentioned that Paul Owen went to Yale.
• Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues: Linda Jackson (Meagan Good), Ron's new girlfriend, studied journalism at Columbia.
• Linda and Andrew are Brown alumni in the movie Anger Management. Jack Nicholson's character Dr. Buddy Rydell went to Columbia University.
• Natalie Ann August, played by Natalie Portman in Anywhere But Here applies and is accepted by Brown, despite the dismay of her mother, played by Susan Sarandon, over the distance.
• In Armageddon (1998), Rockhound, the team's Insufferable Genius, mentions that he has a double-doctorate from MIT and also taught at Princeton for two and a half years.
• The psychiatrist of Jack Nicholson's Melvin Udall mentions her son was accepted into Brown in As Good as It Gets.
• Baby Boom (1987): J.C. has a bachelor's degree from Yale and an MBA from Harvard.
• In Batman Begins, Alfred casually asks Bruce Wayne if he plans to return to Princeton after the trial of his parents' murderer. Bruce tells him that he won't, adding that "I like it fine. They just don't feel the same way." He drops out and goes to China instead.
• In the Coen Brothers' Burn After Reading, Osborne Cox, played by John Malkovich, is a CIA analyst and Princeton class of 1973 graduate. In a scene at a fictional Princeton Club, he leads a fast-tempo rendition of Princeton's anthem, Old Nassau.
• In Booksmart it's Played for Laughs and kicks off the plot. Molly and Amy spent all of their free time in high school studying to ensure they'd go to Ivy League colleges and are enrolled at Yale and Columbia, respectively at the start. But then when Molly boasts of this to some classmates who were mocking her Academic Alpha Bitch attitude, she discovers that they and several others managed to get into good colleges as well (except one guy who's skipping college entirely to work at Google). This causes her to believe the two of them missed out on partying for nothing.
  "Triple A": I'm incredible at hand jobs, but I also got a 1560 on the SATs.
• In Can't Hardly Wait, Preston plans to attend Dartmouth, William will be attending Harvard and though it's not Ivy League, NYU is still pretty prestigious, and Denise manages to get in with no extracurricular activities at all.
• Challengers (2024): Patrick doesn't attend college, as he wants to go pro, while Art and Tashi both go to Stanford (the only school mentioned). While Patrick refers to Pepperdine at one point, he does so mockingly (suggesting that it's beneath Tashi). Art and Tashi both being such incredible, famous tennis players that attend Stanford is more than a little Artistic License since the best schools for sports are not always the best for academics, and vice versa.
• In the movie A Cinderella Story, a major part of the storyline revolves around Sam and Austin's goal of getting into Princeton and studying writing. Of course, they get in.
• In Citizen Kane, the eponymous character is said to have attended and been thrown out of Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Cornell.
• At the end of Coming Soon, Tricia Vessey's character, Nell Kellner, gets accepted to Brown University when she reveals that her father had donated a large sum of money to the school.
• Crazy Rich Asians:
  • Played with in the case of the Asian 1%. Nick's parents and their close friends are mentioned to have gone to Cambridge, and Astrid was top of her class at Oxford. While this is used to primp the family's pedigrees, it's also an indicator of their extravagant wealth, as usually only wealthy families can afford to and/or have the connections to send their kids to prestigious schools without scholarships.
  • Played straight with Rachel who is specifically a professor at NYU.
• In Dead Poets Society, Mr. Nolan mentions that 75% of the previous year's graduates went to The Ivy Leagues. Pitts says he might go to Yale (but he might not). And Neil's father intends him to go to Harvard.
• Dirty Dancing : Mr. Kellerman, when he's giving the "show the daughters a good time" speech to the wait staff, says he recruited them all from Harvard and Yale. Robbie the Jerkass waiter goes to Yale Medical School. Neil (Mr. Kellerman's grandson) goes to Cornell School of Restaurant Management. Baby will be attending Mount Holyoke. And when she gives Jake her speech at the end, she says that he thinks saving the world means marrying someone from Harvard.
• The Education Of Charlie Banks takes place at Brown University.
• Averted in Election. In just about any other movie, a character as intelligent and ambitious as Tracy Flick would be trying to get into an Ivy League school, but her goal is Georgetown because of its very strong political science program and access to government internships. It also subverts the usual standards of this trope in that when Tracy actually gets to Georgetown, she discovers that far from being an intellectual utopia, she still doesn't have much in common with her less ambitious classmates. Fortunately, the academic programs are still every bit as strong as she thought.
• Enemy of the State established Will Smith's intelligence very quickly by mentioning that he graduated from Georgetown.
• Tom Cruise's character Mitch McDeere in The Firm is a recent Harvard Law graduate hired by Memphis law firm that represents organized crime.
• The three original Ghostbusters are faculty at Columbia University, until their unorthodox research focus and lack of results leads to them being let go. Ray even notes their reputation will preclude them from getting grants at MIT or Stanford.
• In The Girl Next Door, Eli Brooks is mentioned as having been accepted to Princeton. Meanwhile, the protagonist Matthew gets accepted into Georgetown.
• In The Godfather, main character Michael Corleone, wishing to avoid the family business, attends Dartmouth College. He later re-enrolls at Dartmouth after fighting in the Pacific Theatre of World War II, where he meets his future wife, Kay Adams.
• In Hamlet 2, the main character, a drama teacher, assumes a Latino student is a gangster. In actuality, the student had gained early admission to Brown.
• Alan Jensen, played by Adrian Grenier, is the point guard of the Harvard basketball team in Harvard Man.
• Referenced in Heathers: Veronica says she's going to have to send her SAT scores to San Quentin, instead of Stanford.
• High School Musical 3: Senior Year: Gabriella goes to Stanford, Troy to Berkley and Taylor to Yale. Gabriella is a Teen Genius, while Troy and Taylor are less talented. Two characters go to Juilliard on a musical theater scholarship, despite the fact that Juilliard has no musical theater programs, but one goes for dance and the other goes for music. Kelsi, one of the scholarship recipients, goes there for composition, despite the fact that in Real Life, Juilliard's composition program is focused on classical music, not musicals.
• In the stoner film How High, two underachieving pot smokers, Silas (Method Man) and Jamal (Redman), use a magic weed to get perfect scores on their THC exams (Testing for Higher Credentials, as opposed to SAT) and to receive admission into Harvard University.
• In Independence Day, David Levinson is berated by his father, and later his ex-wife, for having spent eight years at MIT and deciding to work as a cable repairman.
• Indiana Jones has an undergraduate degree in linguistics and a Ph.D in archaeology from the University of Chicago. He also teaches at Yale.
• Meg Ryan's character, Catherine Boyd, is a mathematics doctoral candidate at Princeton University in the Romantic Comedy I.Q.
• In Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, the titular character is shown attending the London School of Economics when the September 11 attacks occur (Note that in the original novels, Jack graduated from Boston College, which is not Ivy League grade presitigious).
• Keeping the Faith: Beautiful anchorwoman Rachel Rose (Rena Sofer) went to the Columbia University School of Journalism (which is a graduate school, but not an undergrad program).
• In The Kissing Booth Noah casually mentions he got accepted into Harvard University. Besides playing football, he isn't mentioned or depicted as having any other skills or talents, nor are his grades mentioned, so it seems pretty bizarre that he'd be able to get into Harvard, one of the top-ranking universities in the world.
  • In The Kissing Booth 2, the sequel to film mentioned above, Elle also successfully applies to Harvard; her grades are never mentioned as being outstanding, her only extracurricular activities involve organizing a kissing booth and winning an arcade dance game competition, her entrance essay mostly consists of her praising her family and friends while downplaying herself, and she can barely afford tuition let alone other costs.
• The eponymous character of the film Kissing Jessica Stein graduated from Brown.
• In The Last of the Mohicans, Hawkeye says he attended Reverend Wheelock's school. This is presumably Dartmouth College, originally founded as a school to train Native Americans as missionaries.
• In Leatherheads, Carter Rutherford, played by John Krasinski, is a star Princeton quarterback.
• Played With in Legally Blonde, which is about is about supposed bimbo Elle's quest to get into and be successful at Harvard Law School. However, while she applies for it on a whim and gets in, she's actually a very strong candidate: with a 4.00 GPA from a UCLA equivalent with a business-related degree^note she specifically graduated Fashion Merchandising, a 179 LSAT,^note out of 180 and being the president of a sorority, Elle's admission to Harvard Law School was one of the most accurate parts of the movie.
  Warner: You got into Harvard Law?
  Elle: What, like it's hard?
• Letters to Juliet: Sophie (Amanda Seyfried) mentions she was a double-major at Brown University.
• The 1970 film Love Story, written by Harvard alumnus Erich Segal, is a romantic drama about a rich Harvard pre-law, hockey player, played by Ryan O'Neal,^note a character whom Segal later admitted was modeled after his Harvard contemporaries Al Gore and Tommy Lee Jones and a brilliant Radcliffe musicology scholarship student, played by Ali MacGraw. Segal also taught Greek and Latin literature at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
  • The Crimson Key Society, since the late 1970s, screens two movies, including this one, to incoming Harvard freshmen during their orientations. The movie gets mocked and ridiculed for its cheesy, hokey elements. The other movie screened? The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
• In Mars Attacks!, President James Dale (Jack Nicholson) is a Princeton alumnus.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe, the universe where not a single non-Ivy-equivalent exists:
  • In Captain America: The First Avenger, Gabe Jones mentions taking three semesters of German at (historically Black) Howard University. It's not a traditional Ivy League, but it is a "Black Ivy League" school.
  • In Iron Man, Tony Stark graduated from MIT summa cum laude at age 17 (even though MIT doesn't give class rankings or cum laude awards). In Iron Man 2, Stark and Rhodey are both seen wearing the "Brass Rat", the class ring given to MIT grads; which would mean both of them attended. In Captain America: Civil War, Stark is seen giving a speech and starting a scholarship at his alma mater. A Freeze-Frame Bonus shot of his S.H.I.E.L.D dossier◊ shows that he started attending in 1984 and graduated with a B.S. in Engineering in 1987. Yes, he got into MIT at age 14. Also, Stark asks Christine Everhart, a Vanity Fair columnist who questions him about his weapons industry and accuses his company of killing people, if she attended Berkeley. She tells him she actually attended Brown.
  • In The Incredible Hulk, Bruce and Betty are mentioned to have met each other at Harvard University. Bruce also claims to (somehow) have 7 PhDs. Apparently including, at the very least, radiobiology, astrophysics, and computer science...^note His work on the titular Super-Soldier project in The Incredible Hulk was because he was apparently an expert in radiobiology. The Avengers explicitly has Maria Hill calling him an expert on "thermonuclear astrophysics." Avengers: Age of Ultron has him and Stark creating a sapient artificial intelligence.
  • In Black Panther, Ross mentions that Erik Stevens/"Killmonger" graduated from the highly prestigious United States Naval Academy at Annapolis at the age of 19 (even though that's impossible), before going to graduate school at MIT, though we don't know his major. This one's particularly egregious because, while his career and skills can be said to be pretty consistent with those of an Annapolis graduate (military tactics, foreign languages, psychology, and basic military engineering being part of the general curriculum for all majors), he never displays any skills or traits that would suggesting he holds a master's degree or a doctorate in any sort of theoretical or applied science (quite the opposite, he makes rookie mistakes like calling a directed energy explosive launcher "a sonic cannon"), as would be suggested from MIT grad school. This part of the character is limited to a single line in an Info Dump.
  • Daredevil (2015): Matt/Daredevil attended Columbia Law School, one of the top law schools in the USA. So did Foggy.
  • Bill Foster, the main antagonist of Ant-Man and the Wasp, is a professor at UC Berkeley.
  • Slightly downplayed in Spider-Man: No Way Home, where Peter, MJ, and Ned all plan to go to MIT, though they also have backup schools in the Boston area so they can still be together. None of them get in to any of their choices due to the sudden controversy of Spider-Man, but Flash Thompson gets in. Played straight further in the ending where MJ and Ned are both going to MIT now that Peter Parker is wiped from everyone's minds. It is slightly justified as Midtown High in this version is now a school for academically gifted students.
  • Ms. Marvel (2022): Gadgeteer Genius Bruno Carelli is given the opportunity to take an early admission semester at CalTech.
  • Black Panther: Wakanda Forever: Riri Williams is an engineering prodigy who invented a Vibranium detector and is gradually building her own Iron Man suit. To no surprise, she's attending MIT.
• In Mean Girls, Aaron Samuels is pretty bad at calculus and seems like a kind jock, but otherwise shows no above-average skills or any particular studiousness. He's a swimmer, which is not a sport which generates much revenue for colleges and therefore provides little advantage when seeking admission. He gets admitted to the very prestigious Northwestern University after his senior year, despite being from the town where its campus is located. For those not in the know, admission to a highly-ranked college is usually toughest for nearby students since a disproportionate number of them prefer it, either due to exposure at a young age, a desire to stay near family, or the appeal of going to college with their friends. However, the university usually admits very few locals in order to recruit a geographically diverse student body. This usually leads to extremely qualified students getting passed over, rather than a case like Aaron's.
• Merry In-Laws: Alex studied astronomy at Harvard. Her father hates her fiance because he didn't go to Harvard.
• The main characters of My Best Friend's Wedding, played by Julia Roberts and Dermot Mulroney, became friends and made their marriage pact when they were students at Brown.
• In My Cousin Vinny, Judge Haller's diploma from Harvard Law School is prominently displayed in his chambers when interviewing Vinny, who's licensed in New York, to determine if he's qualified to take on this case in Alabama. This contrasts with Vinny's degree from some tiny school that sounds a bit fly-by-night. Additionally, Vinny's cousin William and his friend Stan, whom Vinny defends in court, both attend NYU.
• Norah tells Nick in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist that she was accepted into Brown University.
• The three main leads of Ninja Cheerleaders, Courtney, April and Monica gets accepted to Brown and attends the school at the end of the movie.
• Actively defied in Not Another Teen Movie when Jake asks his dad to stop pushing him to go to Princeton. It's at a point where his dad has various Princeton artifacts such as banners and pillows all over his room and even pasted Jake's head over his own Princeton grad photo.
• In Orange County, Shaun fights like hell to get into Stanford, but ultimately decides to stay near his home and go to the local state college, which he considers a big step down. This, naturally, ignores the fact that Los Angeles is home to several world-class universities of its own, including USC and UCLA.
• Jane Weston, played by Amy Smart, gets accepted to Brown University and attends the school at the end of Outside Providence.
• The 1973 film version of The Paper Chase is an extremely faithful adaptation of the novel, telling the story of Hart's first year at Harvard Law School, and his experiences with Professor Charles Kingsfield, the brilliant, demanding contracts instructor whom he both idolizes and finds incredibly intimidating.
• In The Peacemaker, Col. Devoe and his commandos are interrogating a bomb-maker who is currently hanging off a bridge.
  Devoe: Do you speaking English?
  Bomb-maker: I went to Harvard! Gooooooo Crimson!
• In Princess Diaries 2: Royal Engagement, Princess Mia is referred to as a graduate of Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs.
• Brittany Snow's character, Donna Keppel, protagonist of the 2008 remake of Prom Night, was accepted to Brown, but has doubts about leaving her boyfriend behind.
• Happens at the end of Risky Business. In this case, though, not because the main character Joel Goodson is smart but because the Princeton admissions officer finds the ability to throw massive pimp parties to be a trait worthy of Princeton.
• Say Anything...: Diane Court, the high school valedictorian, has won the Reed Fellowship, so she'll be studying in England. Sheila, who competed with Diane academically all year, is going to Cornell, and she credits Diane for motivating her enough so she'd get in.
• In Seven Pounds, the main character played by Will Smith is an MIT alum.
• Played with in The Shawshank Redemption: When helping one of the guards set up a trust fund, Andy Dufresne asks the guard if he wants his kids to go to Harvard or Yale. The guard recognizes it as a good-natured joke, and bonds with the inmate.
• In She's All That, Zach has been accepted to Dartmouth, Yale and Harvard.
• The 1986 comedy Soul Man is about a man who undergoes racial transformation with pills so that he can qualify for an African-American-only scholarship at Harvard Law School.
• In Soul Plane, a flashback reveals Giselle (K.D. Aubert) had a scholarship to attend NYU and the real reason Nashawn (Kevin Hart) begrudgingly broke up with her was that he didn't want her to give up her only shot at a good school and a great future for their relationship.
• In Spanglish, Cristina Moreno applies to Princeton University in the beginning of the film, telling the story of her childhood in her college essay.
• During a brief exchange in Sphere, it's revealed that three of the main characters received their doctorates at M.I.T., and at early ages to boot.
• Peter Parker is a student at Columbia University in Spider-Man 2. Possibly justified in that Peter Parker is usually depicted as a Teen Genius.
• Starship Troopers:
  • Johnny Rico is told by his father that he's going to go to Harvard. Since Johnny is repeatedly shown to be a dim bulb, it would appear that the trope name has come true. Possibly Justified in that Johnny's family is wealthy and presumably could buy him in, and that in the fascist Federation, liberal arts degrees from Harvard wouldn't carry the same status.
  • Another one of the recruits mentions he got into Harvard and joined the Mobile Infantry so he can afford it.
• In Stay Alive (2006), the lead female character, Abigail, tells her friends that she got into Princeton, but later admits that she lied.
• Main character John resorts to crime in order to pay for his niece's Harvard education in Stealing Harvard. John made a videotape many years ago, on which he promised to pay for Noreen's college tuition if she worked hard and was accepted into a university.
• Nora Clark in Step Up has been accepted to Brown University, but wants to pursue her passion for dancing instead.
• Ana, Maggie Gyllenhaal's "anarchist baker" character in Stranger Than Fiction discovered her baking talent while a student at Harvard Law School.
• Lucy Whitman, the brains of the operation in teen comedy/heist film Sugar & Spice aspires of going to Harvard.
• In the 1993 live-action Super Mario Bros., Princess Daisy is a paleontology student at NYU.
• Evan and Fogell of Superbad are about to start college at Dartmouth College, whereas Seth is going to a state school. His barely repressed frustration over their impending separation is a factor in their Plot-Mandated Friendship Failure.
• Subverted in Swimfan as Ben Cronin (Jesse Bradford) was on track for a possible swim team scholarship to Stanford, but the machinations of an Ax-Crazy Yandere (Erika Christensen) he had an affair with frame him for steroid use, kicking him off the swim team nixing his college chances.
• In The Talented Mr. Ripley, Dickie Greenleaf, played by Jude Law, is a graduate of Princeton. Title character Tom Ripley pretends he is a Princeton alumnus.
• In There's Something About Mary, Cameron Diaz's Mary attended Princeton University. Her ex-boyfriend "Woogie" also received a scholarship from Princeton.
• The title character of The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) attended Dartmouth.
• In Timecop, Big Bad U.S. Senator McComb describes himself as an "ambitious, Harvard-educated visionary who deserves to be the most powerful man in the world."
• Bill Wentz, U.S. Navy radioman in the film U-571, studied German at Brown.
• In UHF, Pamela Finklestein tells somebody on the phone that she thinks Stanley Spawdoski, the dim-witted janitor, went to Harvard.
• In the film version of Up in the Air, Natalie is a Cornell graduate.
• Jonathan "Mox" Moxon (James Van Der Beek), the main character of Varsity Blues, receives acceptance to Brown. His coach (Jon Voight) blackmails him to play football by threatening to ruin his transcript.
• Nick Mercer, the male escort hired by Kat Ellis to be her date to her sister's wedding in The Wedding Date, graduated from Brown with a degree in Comparative Literature.
• In Where the Boys Are, Merritt's love interest Ryder Smith is a student at Brown University. Melanie is also involved with a boy from Yale.
• The protagonist of With Honors, Montgomery 'Monty' Kessler, as played by Brendan Fraser, is a smart but cynical young man who got into Harvard without any money ties. He is set to graduate as a government student with honors if he can put the finishing touches on his senior thesis.
• In an early scene in Wild Wild West, Artemus Gordon's impersonating the President is exposed because he's wearing his class ring - a Harvard class ring, when President Grant was a graduate of West Point.

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