Colleges and universities were hit hard by the COVID crisis. The American Council on Education (ACE) estimated a total impact of $120 billion in a recent letter to legislators. That number reflects both direct expenses and lost revenues. It is easy to identify the direct expenses associated with testing, cleaning, PPE, remote learning technology and improved ventilation systems. But the lost revenues, while harder to measure, were just as impactful. The National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports a 22% drop in students going directly from high school to college. With an estimated 30 million people out of work, part-time enrollments and lower-priced community colleges were affected sharply. Four-year institutions may have experienced smaller overall enrollment drops than the community colleges, but the combination of fewer students in residence halls and significantly higher costs associated with those students who did choose to live on campus, had a dramatic negative impact on auxiliary revenues. Tapping into reserves or endowments, furloughs and layoffs, increases in deferred maintenance, salary cuts and freezes, and other short-term fixes may have helped institutions manage through the crisis but they will have to be made up for at some point. It may turn out that COVID has a delayed impact on the survivability of many institutions that relied on these short-term measures as opposed to addressing more substantially those structural costs that better support long-term sustainability in the face of continuing demographic declines and intensifying competition.