Unlike many other nations, the United States has not promoted universities under direct federal control—apart from military academies—although federal funding and intervention in research, affirmative action and regulation of individual rights have shaped tertiary education in the postwar era. Instead, public education has evolved through systems organized and substantively funded by states and their citizens. These systems include major research universities such as the University of California-Berkeley, University of Michigan, UCLA, Penn State, University of Indiana, University of Illinois and others in systems whose enrollments in undergraduate, graduate, professional and related programs may surpass 100,000 students. These institutions also become interwoven with local development and identity in politics, medicine and sports.

Yet these great universities also participate in systems that incorporate formerly limited regional colleges and teacher’s colleges, divisions inherited from segregation, community colleges and extension programs. In all, state institutions have spread college and advanced education beyond the elite served by private schools, at minimal costs— tuition at public four-year colleges in 1998 averaged $3,000, about one-quarter the cost of private institutions. Nonetheless, state universities face important questions of quality, funding, politics and social meanings far beyond the campus.

The earliest state schools emerged in the South—University of Georgia (1789), University of North Carolina (1789) and Thomas Jefferson’s University of Virginia (1923). Northern states, instead, debated public control over finance and curriculum in the private institutions that became the Ivy League, leading to a court battle confirming the private charter of Dartmouth College. State foundations were helped by federal allocations of land as endowment through the 1862 Morrill Act that funded agricultural and mechanical universities. Some states founded separate schools (Texas A&M), while others expanded state universities. Over time, states also founded and took over regional institutions serving specific areas—Eastern Michigan versus Western Michigan—or specific functions like teacher training (normal schools) and rural outreach. Consolidated state systems, in turn, grew in the postwar period with junior and community colleges that extended public education, albeit in a highly stratified manner.

There remains great variety between systems and within them. California has highly elaborated relationships among colleges and universities, while SUNY has sought to unify and improve New York colleges into universities since 1948 while increasingly funding another public-complex system in CUNY (City University of New York). Some systems focus on a single university (New Hampshire, Vermont), while others have multiple universities and feeder schools (Kentucky, Texas, Florida, etc.). In the South, the role of historically African American colleges within desegregated state systems has often proved problematic.

State systems, as they extend education to more citizens, often face fights over resources within the state to be allocated to each unit and within programs or cities that may compete for recognition. The mass culture of such institutions also has entailed constant challenges of sports versus academics, and demands for mass (practical) and vocational education versus research. While desegregation has made these systems of diversity, they have faced 1990s challenges over the use of race and class to foster admissions that reflect state populations. Student behavior, including excessive alcohol, problems of sex and relationships and social unrest, has also arisen as student organizations have competed with other university ideals—whether fraternities and sororities or the radical political associations in the 1960s who took over campus offices.

Here political traditions clearly differentiate a leftist Berkeley from more social campuses, and the problems of college towns dominate myriad students and academic employers.

Fights over programs also go beyond the campus. While most state universities have been buffered from direct political influence by independent Boards of Trustees, these may be targeted by governors in terms of influential appointments. Moreover, political issues of diversity, salary and productivity, and ideology can spill over into the state legislature and funding process.

Costs are also an issue. The early commitment of public tertiary education often involved free tuition for qualifying students (within the state). This has given way to fees substantially lower and sometimes more flexible than private schools, but not necessarily negligible. Out-of-state tuition, in fact, may equal that of private schools, although research universities may offer generous stipends to foreign students as well as a crosssection of American scholars. Still, containment of costs in salaries, construction and other areas is as real for these systems as for most private universities.

Nonetheless, state universities still embody the triumph of American democratic education as a limited right. They are also constant scenarios for media depictions of coming-of-age events—a somewhat more adult extension of high-school dramas of romance, sports and mayhem.