To be fair, I was only concerned with Penn State, and how it compares with its Big Ten peers. It gets more State funds than any of them (in recent years, anyway). There are audited financial statements of the organization in toto, that illustrate that (whether any entity likes to run multiple internal ledgers within their black box or not). That is just facts.There are always interesting numbers games when comparing state support to public universities. I have seen reports that make the state look generous to PSU and seen analysis that indicates that PSU receives much less per in-state student than the national average. I takes me back to when I to Accounting 101 as an elective and was shocked to find that it was legal to keep multiple sets of books that, while equally accurate, presented a different picture of an individual or organization's financial status.
To use the North Carolina vs PA example, if we are comparing state support to PSU and UNC are we comparing the funding given to the entire UNC system and all PSU campuses or just Chapel Hill and UP? UNC -Chapel Hill has roughly half the students as PSU-UP, so how is that disparity accounted for? Beyond that, if we want an accurate picture, shouldn't we also compare the state support to all state schools? Does one account for population size and demographic differences? If those challenges aren't enough, the structure of state higher education programs vary greatly from state to state making a legitimate apples-to-apples comparison even more difficult.
It was someone else who brought up Virginia and North Carolina (and, I think, to a certain extent, various state's funding of education in general - not just Penn State). I have some thoughts on those topics, but wouldn't claim to have all the detailed information. That could be an interesting conversation - and I was hoping they had some of that background information. But, in any event, that is all a different - and very multi-faceted - issue.