The COVID-19 pandemic has no real historical precedent, and higher education institutions started school in very unusual circumstances in the fall of 2020. In this environment, it is useful to look at the short-term impacts of recent crises for lessons. This article briefly reviews data on enrollment and funding of public institutions from two crises that caused major disruptions in higher education. First is the Great Recession, which began in early 2008, causing mass unemployment and financial turmoil across the United States. The second is Hurricane Katrina, which made landfall in August 2005, causing catastrophic damage to infrastructure and displacing more than 100,000 people in some of the most heavily populated areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama. This analysis finds that, following these crises, there seem to have been different ways of weathering the storms for different types of institutions: research universities have relied on increases in revenue from net tuition, 2-year institutions tended to rely on enrollment increases, and public comprehensive institutions occasionally experienced relatively slower recoveries. The response to COVID-19 will probably follow a path that blends the responses to the two previous crises. State funding to public higher education institutions may contract, causing similar trends by sector to the 2008 recession, while the disruption to instruction that schools are facing may cause enrollment trends similar to Katrina.