The Ivy League comprises eight esteemed universities, namely Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, Harvard University, Princeton University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale. While attending an Ivy League institution does not necessarily determine one’s ability to make a positive impact on the world, it is widely acknowledged that such institutions impart valuable skills and instill important values that can propel individuals towards success. The following is a list of notable alumni from each Ivy League university who have made significant contributions to society.
Brown University
Jim Yong Kim-
Kim co-founded Partners In Health (PIH) in 1987 with Paul Farmer, Todd McCormack, Thomas J. White, and Ophelia Dahl. The organization started out in Haiti with radical new health care programs that focused on the community. It was successful in treating infectious diseases at a low cost, spending $150 to $200 to treat tuberculosis patients at home. In 1994, Peru was added to the PIH model, and in 1998, the World Health Organization adopted the model and supported the implementation of community-based care for underprivileged communities worldwide. Kim was a key player in developing treatment plans and negotiating deals for cheaper, better drugs.
Jessica Meir-
Meir, Jessica Ulrika is an American-Swedish NASA astronaut, marine biologist, and physiologist. Following her postdoctoral research in comparative physiology at the University of British Columbia, Meir was an assistant professor of anesthesia at Harvard Medical School and Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston. She studied the diving physiology and behavior of emperor penguins in Antarctica, as well as the physiology of bar-headed geese, which are able to migrate over the Himalayas. In September 2002, Meir was an aquanaut on the crew of NASA Extreme Environment Mission Operations 4 (NE Meir participated in ESA CAVES, a training program in which international astronauts train in a space-like cave. Meir launched to the ISS on September 25, 2019, aboard Soyuz MS-15, where she was a flight engineer for Expeditions 61 and 62. Meir and Christina Koch were the first women to take part in an all-female spacewalk on October 18, 2019, inspiring many young girls to follow their passions and dreams of becoming astronauts.
Time magazine’s list of the 100 Most Influential People in 2020 included Meir as well.
Leroy F. Aarons-
In 1990, Mr. Aarons’ speech at the American Society of Newspaper Editors convention regarding the findings of the society’s commissioned survey of gay men and lesbians in newsrooms marked a turning point in his career. He, along with Robert Maynard, initiated programs to prepare people of color for journalism careers in the 1970s and later focused on LGBT issues in journalism. Aarons advocated for diversity training in journalism schools and relaunched the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Interest Group of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication in 2003. He founded We the People – The Voice of the North Bay LGBT Community in 1985, which operated as a monthly publication for 27 years. The Leroy F. Aarons Award, which recognizes significant contributions to LGBTQ-related media-oriented education and research, is awarded twice a year by the group.
Columbia University
Anna Baltzer-
Baltzer, a Columbia graduate, received a Fulbright grant in 2003 to teach English in Ankara, Turkey. Since then, she has worked with the International Women’s Peace Service as a volunteer to support nonviolent resistance and document human rights violations in the West Bank. She has documented Palestinian living conditions through her publications and her book, Witness in Palestine, which chronicles her experiences and includes photographs from her eight-month assignment in the West Bank. Baltzer’s activism is centered around nonviolent protests and providing documented information to educate and encourage action towards resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. She believes that mainstream media in the United States fails to cover important information. At a well-organized and well-attended SJP event, Baltzer emphasized that she opposed Israeli policy but was not anti-Jewish.
Marie Maynard Daly-
American biochemist Marie Maynard Daly was born on April 16, 1921, and she died on October 28, 2003. Daly was the first African-American woman and the first African-American person in the United States to earn a Ph.D. in chemistry from Columbia University. She made significant contributions to four areas of research: the uptake of creatine by muscle cells, the chemistry of histones, protein synthesis, the connections between cholesterol and high blood pressure, and the uptake of creatine by muscle cells. In 1975, Daly was one of 30 minority women scientists who went to a conference that looked at the difficulties that minority women faced in STEM fields. The American Association for the Advancement of Science hosted the conference. As a direct consequence of this, the report titled The Double Bind: The Price of Being a Minority Woman in Science, published in 1976, offered suggestions for attracting and keeping minority women scientists.
Cornell University-
Mae Carol Jemison-
Mae Carol Jemison, a 1981 Cornell Medical College graduate, became the first African-American woman to travel into space on September 12, 1992, when she entered orbit aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour. With degrees in chemical engineering and African-American Studies, Jemison broke down barriers and stereotypes about what a Black woman “should be capable of” as a dancer, activist, engineer, and doctor. Jemison joined the Peace Corps after completing her medical education in the 1980s. After drawing inspiration from Lieutenant Uhura on Star Trek, she began to consider joining NASA. She was later accepted into the NASA astronaut program in 1987, and from September 12 to September 20, 1992, she flew her one and only space mission as a Mission Specialist aboard STS-47. After Jemison resigned from NASA, he became a professor at Cornell University and Dartmouth College, established the Jemison Group, a science and technology research organization, and even made a few appearances on television shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation. The World of Wonder and the Next Generation.
Toni Morrison-
Toni Morrison (Cornell Masters of the Arts, Class of 1955) is one of the most celebrated novelists and editors in the United States. She has won the Pulitzer Prize (1988), the American Book Award (1988), the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993), the Jefferson Lecture (the U.S. federal government’s highest honor for achievement in the humanities) in 1996, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2012), to name just a few awards. Morrison is praised for her works that talk about feminism and the Black female experience, but she doesn’t call them feminist. She says, “In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can’t take positions that are closed. Everything I’ve ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation, rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book – leaving the endings open for reinterpretation, revisitation, a little ambiguity”. Her works have been able to speak to people of all races, genders, and identities because of their imagination and openness to new ideas. Morrison has contributed her voice to a number of political platforms in her later years, particularly those regarding police brutality, and she continues to advocate for feminist and civil rights causes.
David Duffield-
David received a bachelor’s degree in software engineering from Cornell in 1964 before earning his MBA. After 40, he became an entrepreneur and established two software companies: Both Workday and PeopleSoft
Workday, a SaaS company, is now valued at $9.5 billion, and PeopleSoft went on to become the second largest application software company.
Dartmouth College-
Lester Granger-
Granger started the Los Angeles chapter of the National Urban League (NUL) in 1930 and worked as an extension worker in Bordentown in 1922 for the Bordentown School, the state vocational school for African American youth in New Jersey. He was in charge of the organization’s efforts in 1934 to fight racism perpetrated by employers and labor unions and to encourage trade unionism among African-American workers.
In 1940, Granger turned into the NUL’s associate chief secretary responsible for modern relations and kept on attempting to coordinate bigoted exchange unions.
In 1941 Granger was named chief secretary of the NUL. During his most memorable year as the head of the NUL, Granger drove its work to help the Walk on Washington to fight racial segregation in safeguard work and the furnished forces. In 1945, he started working with the Branch of Guard to integrate the military, seeing first accomplishment with the Naval force in February 1946. Throughout the course of his career, he continued to be a prominent figure in the field of social work and was elected president of the National Conference of Social Work in 1952.
Elad Levy-
American neurosurgeon, innovator, and researcher Elad I. Levy was a major contributor to the creation and testing of thrombectomy, which improved the quality of life and survival of stroke patients. He has devoted his career and research to the creation of literature and evidence-based medicine demonstrating the advantages of thrombectomy for stroke treatment. Levy is currently the L. Nelson Hopkins, MD Professor Endowed Chair of the Department of Neurosurgery at the State University of New York at Buffalo (SUNY). In 2011, he founded the Program for Understanding Childhood Concussion & Stroke (PUCCS), which has raised over $750,000 to promote research and prevent concussions in all sports. In addition, Levy is the co-chair of CycleNation for the American Heart Association, which has raised over $500,000 to promote
Harvard University-
Paul Samuelson-
Paul Anthony Samuelson was an American economist who was born on May 15, 1915, and passed away on December 13, 2009. He was the first American to win the Nobel Prize in Economics. The Swedish Royal Academies said in 1970 that Samuelson “has done more than any other contemporary economist to raise the level of scientific analysis in economic theory.” Economic historian Randall E. Parker has called him the “Father of Modern Economics.” The New York Times considers him to be the “foremost academic economist of the 20th century.” Samuelson was likely the most influential economist of the latter half of the 20th century. President Bill Clinton praised Samuelson for his “fundamental contributions to economic science” over the course of more than 60 years when he was presented with the National Medal of Science in 1996, which is considered to be America’s highest science honor.
Sophia Akuffo-
Sophia Akuffo was appointed to the Supreme Court in November 1995 by Jerry Rawlings after completing her private practice career. She has served as Chairperson of the Alternative Dispute Resolution Task Force for a number of years and is a member of the Commonwealth Judicial Education Institute’s Governing Committee. She was one of the first judges of the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights in January 2006: she was elected for two years, then re-elected until 2014 and served as Vice-President and President of the Court, respectively. On May 11, 2017, Akuffo was nominated as the highest ranking judge of the Supreme Court of Ghana by Nana Akuffo-Addo, subject to approval by Parliament. She was sworn in as the thirteen She was elected chief justice and became president of this court.
Barack Obama-
He was the first African-American president of the United States. He went to Harvard Law School, where he was also the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review. He went on to practice civil rights law and teach constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School between 1992 and 2004. He was chosen to receive the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize.
The global financial crisis, major financial regulation reform, and the end of a significant US military presence in Iraq were all addressed by Obama’s first-term actions. Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, the first Hispanic American to serve on the Supreme Court, were also appointed by Obama. He directed the counterterrorism operation that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death.
Obama signed a significant international climate agreement and an executive order to limit carbon emissions after winning re-election. In addition, Obama was in charge of putting the Affordable Care Act and other bills passed during his first term into action.
Princeton University
Michelle Obama-
Michelle Obama is the 44th President of the United States. She is a lawyer and author who served as First Lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She is well-known for her extensive work on social issues like education, poverty, and healthy living while she was First Lady of the United States. She has written a memoir, Becoming in 2018, about the experiences that shaped her, from growing up in Chicago to living in the White House. Michelle Obama worked as a lawyer, Chicago city administrator, and community outreach worker before becoming First Lady.
John Nash-
John Forbes Nash, Jr., an American mathematician who was born on June 13, 1928, and passed away on May 23, 2015, was recognized in 1994 with the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics alongside fellow game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten for their fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. He and Louis Nirenberg received the Abel Prize in 2015 for their contributions to partial differential equations research.
Nash introduced a number of ideas, such as the Nash bargaining solution and the Nash equilibrium, while he was a graduate student at Princeton University’s Mathematics Department. These ideas are now thought to be fundamental to game theory and how it can be used in various fields of science. Nash solved a system of Riemannian-geometry-arising nonlinear partial differential equations in the 1950s to discover and demonstrate the Nash embedding theorems. This work, likewise presenting a fundamental type of the Nash-Moser hypothesis, was subsequently recognized by the American Numerical Society with the Leroy P. Steele Prize for Fundamental Commitment to Exploration. Ennio De Giorgi and Nash found, with isolated strategies, a collection of results preparing for an efficient comprehension of elliptic and explanatory halfway differential conditions. Their De Giorgi–Nash theorem on the smoothness of these equations’ solutions provided a solution to Hilbert’s nineteenth problem on regularity in the calculus of variations, which had been a well-known open problem for nearly sixty years.
The University of Pennsylvania
Elon Musk-
Elon Musk founded SpaceX, a company that makes rockets and spacecraft, in 2002. He also co-founded the electronic payment company PayPal, following his belief and interest in seeing a world where the internet could help make life much more convenient, in this case, he aimed to make transactions and payments simpler, more accessible and just one click away. He was a major early investor in Tesla, which produces electric cars and batteries. This has gained a lot of attention in today’s world where environmental care is one of the biggest focuses. In 2008, he became the company’s CEO. In 2022, he bought Twitter, a service for social media.
Carrie Burnham Kilgore-
Despite facing rejection from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1871 and being unable to take the bar exam in 1873 and 1874, Caroline Burnham Kilgore continued to fight for women’s rights as a member of various organizations. She finally gained admission to the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1881 and went on to become the first woman to argue before the United States Supreme Court. Kilgore was a vocal supporter of female workers and suffrage, and even though she faced setbacks, she persisted in her fight for gender equality.
Alice Paul-
Alice Paul received her education at Swarthmore College as well as at the University of Pennsylvania, where she completed her doctoral dissertation on the legal status of women in Pennsylvania in 1912. She went on to earn law degrees from American University and Washington College.
Paul also went to the universities of London and Birmingham to study sociology and economics. She participated in the Women’s Social and Political Union while living in England, and as a participant in the campaign for women’s rights led by Emmeline Pankhurst and her daughters, Christabel and Sylvia, she was repeatedly detained and imprisoned.
Paul established the National Woman’s Party in June 1916, and its sole plank was a resolution urging the immediate adoption of the federal amendment guaranteeing women’s enfranchisement. Alice Paul’s Equal Rights Amendment was introduced to Congress by the National Woman’s Party in 1923.
Paul established the World Woman’s Party in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1938. The World Woman’s Party successfully lobbied for equality provisions to be included in the United Nations charter after the war. On July 9, 1977, Paul passed away in Moorestown, New Jersey.
Yale University-
Nimrod Booker Allen-
In addition to being one of the Big Walnut Country Club’s founders, Allen was a prominent and well-liked figure in numerous Columbus, Ohio, and national organizations.
Along with a number of other people who founded the Big Walnut Country Club, Allen came to Columbus in 1915 to lead the Spring Street YMCA. Under Allen’s visionary guidance, the Frontiers Club of Columbus was established in 1936. It became the first African American service organization in the United States as it expanded throughout Ohio and the rest of the country.
This was the only service organization working solely to discover, cultivate, and mobilize Negro leadership in the Americas and South America at the time.
Allen was a man of wisdom and vision who was able to effectively establish the Columbus Urban League in 1917. During his 33 years as the League’s Executive Secretary, many positive changes took place, including virtually no employment opportunities for African Americans. In addition, he was the first to coordinate the press, radio, and television, as well as the police department and the public, to collaborate to foster interracial harmony.
G.H.W. Bush-
He is regarded as an example of humility as well as honesty during this time of national incivility. He is unique as a leader because of each of these characteristics—among many others—that set him apart from others.
The nation and, ultimately, the world may have benefited greatly from his leadership during the post-Soviet era of uncertainty. He wanted to include Eastern Europe and Russia in the international community. His leadership style is evidenced by the stability in Eastern Europe and the accession of nations to NATO.
The Americans with Disabilities Act and the amendments to the Clean Air Act were two notable domestic accomplishments of Bush.
Jane M. Bolin-
Judge Jane M. Bolin was the nation’s first African American woman to be appointed a judge and the first black woman to graduate from Yale Law School (LAW ’31). In 1939. Bolin was appointed by Fiorello La Guardia, the mayor of New York City, to the city’s Family Court. Bolin served in that limit with regards to forty years. She made a name for herself on the bench by opposing racial discrimination in the legal system and advocating for children, particularly those of color, in the cases she frequently presided over. Bolin served on the boards of several organizations in addition to her decades as a judge, including the New York Urban League and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Beatrix McCleary Hamburg-
Beatrix McCleary Hamburg made history as the first Black woman to graduate from Yale School of Medicine in 1948, overcoming significant obstacles. Her research in adolescent psychiatry, mental health, and violence prevention led to innovative school-based counseling programs and conflict resolution. Hamburg led psychiatric clinical services at Harvard and Mount Sinai, was a DeWitt Wallace Distinguished Scholar at Cornell, and served as president of the William T. Grant Foundation, promoting healthy living and reducing child violence. She continued to advocate and advise even after her presidency.
To conclude, these ivy league colleges have shaped these influential individuals who have followed their passions and worked hard to change the world, its orthodox perspectives, and make it a more inclusive space for humans of every sexuality, gender, color, race, ethnicity, etc. These ivy league colleges have given the world some of the most important activists, revolutionists, novelists, journalists, politicians, founders, etc. the work of whom still continues to shape the world we live in and pave the way for greatness.
