There are not a lot of higher education schools in Alaska due to the low population of the state, but it is still home to several institutions that offer two and four year degrees.
The largest university by far in the state is the University of Alaska with a total enrollment of over 30,000 distributed among its three campus locations in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau. It is pretty remarkable to see a university with that many students given that the US Census Bureau reported that the population of all of Alaska was only 722,000 in 2011.
The University of Alaska campus in Fairbanks was founded in 1917 in part due to a federal land grant from the United States. This was 42 years before Alaska became the 49th state in 1959.
The operating and capital budgets for higher education are set by the legislature and the Governor of Alaska. An estimated one-third of the jobs and income in Alaska is dependent on the federal government so a large portion of the funding for universities indirectly comes from federal money.