Penn State was chartered by the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania in 1855 as a college of agricultural science. After Congress passed the Morrill Land-Grant Act in 1862, the state legislature designated it Pennsylvania’s land-grant institution. In the 1930s it set up undergraduate branch campuses, the predecessors of today’s campuses across the Commonwealth. It describes itself as one of three land-, space-, sun- and sea-grant universities in the United States.
University Park in State College is its largest campus. Other units include Penn State World Campus, which offers more than 200 online programmes, the College of Medicine and Penn State Dickinson Law. The university states it has more than 86,000 students, more than 6,000 faculty and more than 819,000 alumni, with annual research expenditures of $1.44 billion. Neeli Bendapudi became its nineteenth president in May 2022.