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I'm not sure how to write this:

a) Jon was accepted to Northwestern and Cornell University.

b) Jon was accepted to Northwestern and Cornell Universities.

In this example, I'm pretty sure you can omit the repeated word "university." Since we're dealing with two universities, I think b) may be correct. However, in example a), "university" is right next to the singular "Cornell," so I'm not sure.

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    (a) would only be correct if there'a a single university called "Northwestern and Cornell". (b) is fine if both of two universities (Northwestern and Cornell) offered Jon a place, and that's how it would normally be expressed. There's nothing actually wrong with the more verbose form Jon was accepted to Northwestern University and Cornell University (where each university is singular), but most native speakers wouldn't be likely to use that form very often, if at all.
    – FumbleFingers
    May 19, 2019 at 15:41
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    The second sentence is fine but, stylistically, you should not be capitalizing universities. It's not being used as part of a proper noun, but as a plural common noun. (The two universities, not the two Universities.)
    – Jason Bassford
    May 20, 2019 at 16:25
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    But don't you capitalize Cornell University by itself?
    – user27343
    May 21, 2019 at 4:30
  • Isn't Cornell University a proper noun? In this particular case, we use "universities" because it applies to the plural common noun as opposed to each individual proper noun (Cornell University).
    – user27343
    May 22, 2019 at 4:42

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The name of each institution contains the word "University", however it would be correct to abbreviate them to simply "Northwestern" and "Cornell".

As both are universities, you could write:

Jon was accepted to Northwestern and Cornell universities.

This is my recommended approach. However, it would also be valid to say:

Jon was accepted to Northwestern University and Cornell University.

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