[Excerpt] The eight Ivy League institutions – Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Harvard, Pennsylvania, Princeton and Yale - are among our nations most selective undergraduate institutions. They also are among its wealthiest. They compete against each other for top faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, as well as on intercollegiate athletic fields. However, this competition has never taken place on a level “playing field” because of the vast differences in endowment resources that have always existed across the institutions. The prolonged stock market expansion during the 1990s magnified these differences in ways that many still do not fully comprehend.