College During COVID

Students and their families must be ready to adapt to the changes in the way they attend— and possibly pay for—college.

- By Stacy Rapacon

AT KIPLINGER, THE NAME OF THE GAME is value. For more than 20 years, our annual college rankings have been no exception. Over the years, we analyzed data on hundreds of public and private colleges and universities across the nation seeking institutions that deliver a high-quality education at an affordable price.

But this year, as the coronavirus forced schools to shutter in mid-March and transformed the higher-education system practically overnight, we put our rankings on pause. Instead, we decided to focus on strategies for getting the most value out of a reeling higher education system, including transfers, gap years and increased financial aid.

For Mika Garcia, a 21-year-old rising senior at the University of West Florida (UWF), the pandemic shutdown meant a softball season cut short. “It was extremely heartbreaking,” she says. “Everything was shut down— no weights, no practice, no games, no visiting one another. It was a weird and confusing and sad time, for sure.”

Samuel Merritt, 20, who was attending the American University of Paris, had to quickly find a flight home. Although he says doing so was “pretty easy,” his father, Dan, recounts the situation differently, noting inflated prices for last-minute tickets to airports near their home in West Caldwell, N.J., and a layover in Düsseldorf, Germany: “I was completely freaked out about his getting home from Paris,” he says. “My biggest concern was that he’d get to Düsseldorf and get stuck there, where he has no place to stay and I don’t know if I’m going to be able to get to him.”