The University of California at Berkeley, which says it got a $15.2 million chunk of the emergency financial aid grants, gives students who need more than $500 (and didn’t get more than $1,000 in refunds on campus housing) a grant of $1,300 if the expected family contribution is zero and $500 if the expected family contribution is more than $10,000.

Because of the crisis and its financial and logistical disruption, many students are belatedly swarming the financial aid offices of cheaper state schools closer to home after belatedly giving up on colleges far away. Their financial aid situation has likely changed—there’s a good possibility that their parents have been fired, furloughed or seen their pay cut. Their Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) forms, a reflection of a family’s financial status two years ago, no longer reflect reality.

That means schools are fielding an unprecedented number of appeals. The lecturer at Texas A&M, who is familiar with the financial aid office there, says that students have overwhelmed the phone center, and on one day in early August it couldn’t make callback appointments after 10 a.m.

“I’m expecting the number of families who appeal for more college financial aid to double or even triple,” says Kantrowitz. He says colleges he’s familiar with but doesn’t want to name have seen the requests triple.

“Our schools have definitely indicated that they are busier than ever,” says Coval, at the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “A big part of what they’re hearing from students and families is that right now, when you fill out the FAFSA, you put in two years’ prior income, so there’s many people who are saying ‘Hey, my income from two years ago is not where it is now. It’s not even where it was six months ago before this started.’ So what’s on my FAFSA form and what generates the [expected family contribution] and what aid a student gets is no longer accurate for me. So schools are dealing with going through those” in the form of appeals and adjustments.

Road Trip? Not So Fast
Incoming students during the pandemic likely have a higher interest in gap years than ever before, Kantrowitz says, while returning students likely want to take a leave of absence to wait out the pandemic. But there are a lot of financial and personal land mines here.

“Ten percent of people who take gap years never go back to college,” he says. “Students who do go to college after a gap year are much less likely to ultimately graduate.” He says some students might take the route of community college first and then move to their chosen colleges, but then they are considered transfer students rather than first-year students, “and transfer students get thousands of dollars less in grants to help pay for college than incoming freshmen. So it can cost you more ways than one.”

Taking a leave of absence has its own pitfalls, he says. If you’re a continuing student and you skip the fall semester, you are likely tipping over your six-month grace period for student loan repayments. You might reset in the spring and get your regular loan in-school deferment back, but your six-month grace period would never get restored. “Meaning that when you ultimately graduate, you enter repayment immediately,” Kantrowitz continues. “You don’t have the six months to get settled in your new job with your new apartment. You have to start paying back immediately.”

Walker says that schools won’t be able to accommodate all the requests for formal gap years and still handle all the admission requests for next year. It will have a deleterious cascading effect. She says that if kids are taking time off, it has to be intentional and serious, not just an opportunity to lie low, which would make it more likely students will get off track.

“Unfortunately, 80%-20% rule of life, 80% of families don’t approach the gap year that way,” she says.

Schools Under Water
Covid-19 aside, American higher education was already facing a big crisis—a drop in state funding, a drop in international students (a rich source of income) and kids’ reassessment of college value. Kantrowitz says universities now are going to be under tremendous financial pressure to make up evaporating enrollments (a problem briefly exacerbated by the Trump administration’s short-lived idea of forcing international students to take in-person classes. Harvard and MIT sued, demonstrating that, empathy and ethics aside, international students are dearly important to colleges’ bottom lines).

Many of these colleges have fixed costs and it’s not as easy to simply tap or transfer endowment funds.