Big Three (colleges)

The Big Three is a historical term used in the United States to refer to Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. The phrase Big Three originated in the 1880s, when these three colleges dominated college football. In the early 1900s, these schools formed a sports compact that predates the Ivy League. The rivalry remains intense, though the three schools are no longer athletic powers, and schools continue to refer to their intercollegiate competitions as "Big Three" or "Harvard-Yale-Princeton" meets.

Princeton, like [Harvard and Yale], confers some social distinction upon its graduates. In this respect Harvard, Yale, and Princeton [and recently the University of Chicago] are the Western Counterparts of Oxford and Cambridge, and are maintained largely for the sons of rich men. Members of the American aristocracy would send their boys to one or other of these three universities if there were any aristocracy in the United States.

Edward Digby Baltzell wrote: "The three major upper-class institutions in America have been Harvard, Yale, and Princeton." These colleges have, in the past, been set apart from others by a special historic connection with the White-Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) establishment. Baltzell added, "Throughout the thirties and well into the forties, Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and the University of Pennsylvania were still staffed almost entirely by old-stock Protestants." Of the three, Princeton University was traditionally the preferred choice of the Southern upper class.Theodore Roosevelt put the three schools into social context:

We drew recruits from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and many another college; from clubs like the Somerset, of Boston, and Knickerbocker, of New York; and from among the men who belonged neither to club nor to college, but in whose veins the blood stirred with the same impulse which once sent the Vikings over sea.

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