A state university system normally means a single legal entity and administration, but may consist of several institutions, each with its own identity as a university. Some states—such as California and Texas—support more than one such system.

State universities get subsidies from their states. The amount of the subsidy varies from university to university and state to state, but the effect is to lower tuition costs below that of private universities. As more and more Americans attend college, and private tuition rates increase well beyond the rate of inflation, admission to state universities is becoming more and more competitive.

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History

The tradition of publicly funded state colleges began primarily in the southern states. The University of Georgia is the country's oldest chartered public university, established on January 27, 1785 by an act of the General Assembly of Georgia. However, The University of Georgia did not hold classes until 16 years later in the fall of 1801. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, while chartered four years after Georgia in 1789, was the first state university to hold classes. Classes began at UNC in 1795, and UNC is the only state university to have graduated students in the 18th century. The University of South Carolina was chartered in 1801 and held classes for the first time in 1805. The University of Tennessee was originally chartered as Blount College in 1794, but had a very difficult beginning—graduating only one student—and did not begin receiving the promised state funds until 1807 when it was renamed East Tennessee University. The first state university that matches most modern definitions of the term—including a strict secular course of study, offering professional and graduate coursework, and allowing students to select their coursework—was the University of Virginia. Established due to the work of Thomas Jefferson and grounded in his philosophy of a strong secular state, UVA was chartered in 1819 and first held classes in 1825.

Determining which state university was the "first" is further complicated by the case of New Jersey's state university system. Facing the embarrassment of being the only state left that had not established a state university, the New Jersey Legislature decided to commission an already existing private university as its state university, rather than build one from the ground up, as other states had done. Rutgers University, which had previously been a private school affiliated with the Dutch Reformed Church, was designated as a state university by acts of the legislature in 1945 and 1956. It became a 'System' with the absorptions of Newark University in 1946 and The College of South Jersey in 1950, becoming Rutgers' Newark and Camden Campuses, respectively. Rutgers was chartered in 1766, nineteen years before The University of Georgia, but did not become the state university for another 179 years.