Commonwealth System of Higher Education

The Commonwealth System of Higher Education is a statutory designation by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that confers "state-related" status on four universities located within the state. The designation establishes the schools as an "instrumentality of the commonwealth" and provides each university with annual, non-preferred financial appropriations in exchange offering tuition discounts to students that are residents of Pennsylvania and a minority state-representation on each school's board of trustees. Legally, however, the universities remain separate and private entities, operating under their own charters, governed by independent boards of trustees, and with its assets under their own ownership and control thereby retaining much of the freedom and individuality of private institutions, both administratively and academically. It is the only public-private hybrid system of higher education in the United States that is so construed, although Cornell University, the University of Delaware, and Rutgers University represent alternative types of public-private university hybrids.

Universities of the Commonwealth System are considered public universities by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching because they offer reduced tuition for citizens of the Commonwealth and therefore are often referred to as "public" universities in publications, by the state, and the schools themselves. Because their annual state allocations that supplement less than 10% of their budgets, universities in the Commonwealth System tend to have higher tuition costs compared to the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education which contains 14 state-owned and operated universities. Because of their independence, universities in the Commonwealth System are exempt from Pennsylvania's Open Records law except for a few minor provisions.

Before the creation of the "state-related" legal status in the 1960s, Lincoln University, Temple University, and University of Pittsburgh were fully private universities. Temple and Pitt were granted state-related status by acts of Commonwealth's legislature in 1965 and 1966, respectively. Lincoln University, a historically black university, was designated as a state-related university in 1972.

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