College students at a loss for work hours, tuition costs and institutions make a

When the coronavirus pandemic hit last spring, Johanna Metz lost hours at her retail job and spent a month on unemployment before finding full-time work at a brand-name outlet store in Riverhead. She needed the work hours to pay expenses while attending SUNY Old Westbury.

Now, the 21-year-old junior psychology major from Mastic faces cuts in her work schedule again, as the pandemic has been particularly hard on the retail and restaurant sectors favored by college students to help make ends meet.

“I’ll only be working 15 hours a week, which is terrible,” Metz said. “It’s just getting slower and slower — because of COVID, people don’t want to come out. They have to cut everyone’s hours. … It’s pretty rough, I’m not going to lie to you.”

With the arrival of spring semester bills, universities and community colleges said they are seeing an even greater need for financial assistance. Many students, besides their own job woes, report a loss in financial support from family members also beset with employment and business setbacks.

Schools said they have been responding by disbursing millions in federal emergency aid, grants from their own hardship and emergency funds, and putting in place more flexible tuition and fee payment schedules.

“We’ve never, ever had these levels of requests for funds, and it’s literally horrible stories,” said Sylvia Diaz, executive director of the Suffolk County Community College Foundation, an entity that gives charitable donations to students. She said the foundation’s relief funds typically get 30 or 40 requests in a calendar year compared to the hundreds that came in during the pandemic.

Of the 26,016 students enrolled at Suffolk County Community College for spring and fall 2020, 11,287, or 43%, received grants from the federal CARES Act, Diaz said. The emergency aid program was created last spring to assist students with pandemic-related costs.

In addition to the federal aid, Diaz said, more than 500 students were awarded grants from the college’s COVID-19 Relief Fund and another hardship fund.

“Of those, 444 were in need of assistance due to a job loss,” she said. “One hundred and fifty-five of them had a COVID diagnosis themselves and or in their household.”

Suffolk County Community College spokesman Drew Biondo said a high number of CARES Act applicants “indicated loss of income. … Pre-pandemic, it was not uncommon for our students to hold down two or three jobs.”

A lot of those jobs were in the retail and restaurant sectors. Initial unemployment claims filed last March through January were more than 700% higher in accommodations and food services, and 824% higher in retail trade, compared to the same period a year earlier, according to state labor department figures.

During that time, restaurants were forced to stop or severely limit indoor dining to limit spread of infection. Some stores also limited the number of people allowed to enter, while movie houses and theaters were forced to close for months.

“Students who appealed ​for more aid because of personal loss of work indicated working in movie theaters, grocery stores, pharmacies, babysitting, and restaurants,” said Marcelle Hicks, senior director of Undergraduate Admissions at New York Institute of Technology in Old Westbury.

‘I’m surviving, trying to figure it out’

Suffolk County Community College student Santos Sorto, 34, a mother of four, works as a teaching assistant at a Head Start program. The pandemic forced her to stop cooking and delivering meals to factory workers for extra income, but hardship aid from the college allowed her to continue her studies, she said, and “they still help me with a little bit, but I’d like to work.”

“It’s a struggle. I’m surviving, trying to figure it out,” Sorto said.

Adelphi University in Garden City, where almost all of its nearly 8,000 students get some form of financial aid, is helping through fundraising, federal funds and flexibility in tuition payments, said Kristen…