As you can tell, there is no standard of you have to know them all by heart or be willing to look them up unfortunately. Generally “University of” [State Name] references the flag-ship state college system but not always. Louisiana State University is the flagship system there and the “University of Louisiana” name was added later to other state schools under a different system. Having the state name in the school doesn’t mean that it is a state university either and not having one doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t. Cornell is both an Ivy League private school and a New York land grant state school.
Why should they change? Ohio State’s the one that sucks. 
And the former is commonly called Penn State, and within Pennsylvania the other is just called Penn - but I’ve seen it referred to as UPenn elsewhere. When I’ve asked why, I’ve been told that “Penn” is too easy to confuse with Penn State, but somehow “UPenn” isn’t. No, I don’t quite understand it either.
Somewhere I heard that this was the result of a publicity campaign for the Big 8 back in the 70s. I didn’t see the campaign myself, but apparently they needed to have all the abbreviations end with a U, probably for rhyming purposes.
The result is that it disambiguates UO (Oregon) from OU (Oklahoma) and UK (Kentucky) from KU (Kansas). However, there’s really no need to distinguish CU (Colorado) from UC (California) since the latter abbreviation is rarely used. Instead they either say Cal or sometimes UCB for the Berkeley campus, and UCD, UCI, UCR, UCLA, etc for the other campuses.
Having gone to Uchicago, I can tell you that the U is very important in distinguishing from Chicago State University and UIC. Although for the record, it seems to be only people in Chicago suburbs who make that mistake.
My University is properly the University of Dublin, but it was founded as Trinity College in 1592, with the aim, presumably of subsequently founding other colleges, although this never happened. It is most usually referred to as Trinity College Dublin, although I think they are technically not synonymous.
So:
The college website is www.tcd.ie
I usually say I went to “Trinity”
My obituary will list my degree as MB BCh BAO (Dublin)
I was a member of the university boat club (DUBC)
As there are now two other universities in Dublin, University College Dublin (UCD) and Dublin City University (DCU), it is important to distinguish between them.
There is a big difference between University of the NorthWest and Northwest University. And of course neither is the better known Northwestern University.
Now that the University of Nebraska is in the Big 10, it should really change its nickname to UN to avoid confusion with the other NU (Northwestern).
You are confusing official names of universities with their logos, trademarks, etc. Logos have been developed over time to distinguish themselves from other universities and develop a sense of a brand. This a common marketing practice.
I hate to break it to you, but Oregon State is two years older than Ohio State.
Most universities share their abbreviation with others, but Ohio State alums seem to be uniquely confused by the situation. Now, I don’t want to imply this reflects on the quality of the education, but …
I, for one, am glad University of Florida does not use “FU” in any of their official logos (at least, I don’t think they do)
Sorry, no. I graduated the University of Missouri (Columbia, if anyone cares) in 1974, and the MU designation was there long before I ever set foot on campus. For that matter, our archrival was KU and that school to the southwest of us was OU.
The Oregon State University name is a relatively recent development. It was Oregon State College before that.
Ohio State was also called a “College” not a “University” back then.
You are just playing with us about this, right? You don’t really think that all Universities should change their natural abbreviation to avoid any duplicates, right?
Your second link there is broken. You meant Northwest University (or perhaps a link to their official website would be more appropriate).
And none of those, incidentally, are connected to Northwest College.
Ohio State had been The Ohio State University since the 1870’s and in the 1950’s and 60’s Oklahoma and Oregon decided to come in and rip off the OSU abbreviation. Trademark theft pure and simple.
And yes of course it was a freaking joke. It was a flippant remark at the end of a long post that when my friend refers to Oregon State as OSU, it gives me some pause and that it would be nice if they changed the name.
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The abbreviation for “The Ohio State University” is TOSU, they seem to like the “The” as part of their name
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I can’t find “OSU” anywhere on their logo’s and licensing pages, are you sure they own that mark?
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I believe Oregon State switched recently to just “OS”, probably for trademark issues, but now I’m wondering if Ok State has the trademark
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The natural abbreviation that people use has nothing to do with who owns a trademark, people just use the natural few letters that make up the name. This happens with all of the other universities, it happens with tech companies and tech products, etc.
I’ve never been able to figure out why, but the local paper insists on referring to KU as “Kansas University”. Oddly enough, they will refer to all of the other schools in the conference correctly but they can’t get their own school’s name right.
North Texas State University changed its name to the University of North Texas in 1988, but for reasons I’ve never quite figured out left the name of the campus radio station as “KNTU.”
snerk