Some would say Harvard and Yale are the Oxford and Cambridge of the US. But we’re a big country, and we have a lot of schools. Many lists of top schools include these, alphabetically ordered:

Columbia University, Cornell University, Harvard University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Rice University, Stanford University, University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, University of Pennsylvania, Yale University

But this discussion of rankings reminds me of a quote from John Allen Paulos:

In fact, trying to convert a partial ordering into a total one is, I think, at the root of many problems. Reducing intelligence to a linear ordering—a number on an IQ scale—does violence to the complexity and incomparabilities of people’s gifts.

They're West coast. "Elite" schools in the U.S. are typically East coast (old monied).

Just want to point out that “old money” in the USA is a different thing than “old money” in Europe. The whole USA is only around 350 years old.

Some of the American old money came from European old money.

Very, very few. Those were mostly loyalists and left in 1776.

That would be Harvard - MIT.

But Stanford is in the same league for sure.