@northwesty: I said PSU is just like Cornell’s contract colleges.
And as you noted, several of UVa’s colleges are private now, in effect, no matter what they may call themselves for political purposes.
It seems like many people (like you) just aren’t comfortable with shades of gray and want to put schools in to buckets like “private” and “public”. Or maybe you’re not comfortable with the de facto privatization of many publics. Or maybe you just don’t like the fact that PSU is more privatized than UMich (for some reason).
At one point in time, there was a clear delineation, but these days, with the privatization of many parts of many publics, the distinction between “public” and “private” is very much blurred and for many schools, whether they are considered public or private is more a historical relic than anything else.