In the wake of coronavirus, hundreds of thousands of college students are now coping with the stress of an uncertain future. Alana Hendy, a junior at Georgetown University, wonders what will happen to her work-study job in the dean’s office at the School of Foreign Service. How will her responsibilities as a teaching assistant in a geography class change with the new online format?

But counterbalancing the uncertainties, she says, is support offered by the university. It is helping defray low-income students’ costs for shipping medication, books, and other necessities. And the campus’s food pantry is open and stocked twice a week.

As a senior in high school, Jada Ponce was surprised to get a letter stating that she’d been admitted to the University of Idaho—without having applied. 

Rather than waiting for students to apply, Idaho admits those who meet a certain combination of requirements to all of its public universities and community colleges, before they fill out a single form.

The idea is not only to embolden these students to pursue degrees, but to get them to stay in Idaho, which has experienced a brain drain of high school graduates leaving for college elsewhere and never coming back.