In a brand-name culture, SUNY is an awfully hard brand to define, especially when it’s still often thought of as an upstate phenomenon in a state whose center of gravity is south in New York City and its suburbs.

But another reason that SUNY has struggled to forge an identity is because that was the idea from the start. New York was the last of the populous states to form a university system. SUNY was not founded until 1948 and over the strenuous objections of the state’s powerful private colleges and universities. And it began with the stipulation that it would only “supplement” the private institutions and not compete with them. State legislators established an unfriendly board of regents and imposed the nation’s strictest regulations on what the university could do. An informal prohibition on raising private funds meant that New York’s state universities for decades grew without the endowments that supported campuses elsewhere. No wonder that a study in 1960 called SUNY a “limping and apologetic enterprise.”

Virtually alone in the country, there was (and still is) no flagship institution, no Madison, Berkeley or Austin to provide a network of loyal supporters for years to come, no beloved Buckeyes, Huskies or Gators to create a common wellspring of good will. (SUNY’s most conspicuous attempt to play in that league — Binghamton’s one trip to the N.C.A.A. Division I basketball tournament in 2009 — ended in scandal, with arrests of several players, accusations of preferential treatment for athletes and the implosion of the program.) Add in that the City University of New York was there to suck up all the energy and attention for public education in the most populous and influential part of the state, and SUNY has been climbing uphill since its inception.

It prospered in flush times under Nelson Rockefeller but has been under siege of late. State and SUNY leaders repeatedly debate its mission, including the question of whether it could be seen as a great university system without its own Berkeley or the University of Virginia.

Still, not many of the moments has been more challenging than this one.

Since 2000, SUNY has had five interim, acting or full chancellors. It faces a budget meltdown with no bottom in sight, having lost $634 million in state support over the past three years. Those cuts come amid steadily growing demand for its services. Enrollment has increased by 25,000 over the past year, and even the downstate suburbanites who are most receptive to the appeal of private universities are taking long looks at the state’s public ones as well.

It’s true that on college message boards and in admissions buzz, SUNY doesn’t get much love. “Maryland, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio all have excellent state flagships and are close to the northeastern private colleges. Where did NY go wrong?” wrote one posting in March on the Web site College Confidential.

But almost all the SUNY campuses are seeing rising numbers of applicants as price and practicality loom larger than the perceived brand on the rear-window decal. Maybe in good times you didn’t think twice about spending $50,000 a year for Lehigh or Colgate instead of $20,000 for comparable educations at Binghamton or Geneseo, but that has never been an option for people of limited means, and increasingly it’s not an option for many of the affluent, either.