Here’s a statistic to make you blink. The FAMUAN Online, a student publication of Florida A&M University, reported today that the university’s financial aid office receives an average of 2,000 phone calls a day during the peak financial periods of the year. Two. Thousand.

The office has 18 staff members who answer phone lines. How’d you like that job? It breaks down to 100 calls a day per staffer during peak periods, but even if it were 100 calls per staffer per week, it sounds like a tough task. The article, not surprisingly, was about students’ frustration with FAMU’s financial aid assistance (or lack thereof) vs. administrators’ frustration with students who call with questions about topics other than financial aid, or who have Mom or Dad call for them.

One standout take-away from the article was the critical need to get your FAFSA done completely, correctly, and early.

At the northern edge of the country, the University of Illinois announced at very happy Foundation dinner that it broke its previous fundraising record this year, raking in more than $220 million. That’s not counting a separate 6-year-old funding campaign that took in enough cash to pass the $1.7 billion mark this summer. (That’s “billion,” not “million.” Looks like the University of Illinois is coping with the recession fairly well.) The UI Foundation website says, “The primary goal of this Campaign is to secure the reputation of the University of Illinois as the nation’s top public university.”

Define “top.”

Two months ago, the Chicago Sun-Times reported that Illinois Monetary Award Program (MAP) grants for low-income college students were going to be cut in half for students who applied before May 15 and denied entirely to the 130,000 students whose applications were received after May 15th— an application deadline moved up 4 months from its traditional September date. The Illinois state budget was broke and had no funding to provide for the huge jump in college students seeking state financial aid.

If any of those hundreds of thousands of Illinois students denied MAP grants are (or were) enrolled at UI, it’s great to imagine that some of the university’s new millions could go toward helping them stay in (or come back to) school.

Illinois wasn’t alone in its budget crisis. Several hard-hit states had to make grim funding decisions this year, including Indiana, California, Ohio, Michigan, Florida, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. In some cases, states had to cut back or cut out normally-appropriated college aid; in other cases, it wasn’t a funding cut, but a huge increase in college applicants that caused the budgeted grant money to run out early. And Pennsylvania’s state operating budget is still not resolved, so PA college students are still waiting to hear what’s happening with their state grants.

There’s been a lot of discussion in the news about how colleges and college students are coping with the recession. The tricky thing about a recession, of course, is the dilemma of opportunity vs. affordability. A job loss suddenly provides a worker with the time to go back to school — whether to upgrade credentials for an existing career or get training for a new career and job altogether — but the income loss may make a return to school financially unworkable.

The National Association for College Admission Counseling, which wrapped up its annual conference at the end of September, released an admissions and enrollment survey it conducted among its schools. Specifically, the Association wanted to know how colleges and their students have been coping with the effects of the recession on personal and institutional finances.

Despite all the financial difficulties a recession brings, many students still appear to see higher education as the right course to pursue in a transitional economy. And colleges appear to be trying to help, by finding more financial aid to offer. Here are some interesting enrollment and financial aid details from the NACAC survey:

• College enrollment in surveyed schools increased about 60% for the fall 2009.
• 54% of those students were transfer students. Public colleges and colleges in the south had the highest number of transfer students (a number of southern states have a statewide policy agreement that has simplified the transfer process among the public 2-year and 4-year colleges in each state’s system).
• So many students applied for college admission that more than 15% of the public colleges surveyed created an admissions waiting list for the first time ever!
• 90% of this year’s college applicants also applied for financial aid.
• Half of the public colleges suffered budget cuts, including, on average, one full person working in the admissions department.
• Nevertheless, 74% of the colleges surveyed increased the number of students they gave school grants to, and more than half of surveyed colleges increased the amount of the school grants they offered. Every single type of surveyed school boosted financial aid — public and private colleges, large and small colleges, and colleges in every region of the country.

It looks as though many schools are trying to make up for the cuts in state education grants and the limits on Pell grants and other federal grants for college students.

Colleges that will try to help with financial aid are out there!

If you can do it without bankrupting yourself in the future, returning to school for a new credential could be a practical, valuable use of recession time, and changes to federal unemployment insurance allow you to keep your unemployment benefits while you’re in school.

Maybe the key to finding an affordable college program is to shop around the schools in your area and your state to see which ones can offer you the greatest amount in institutional (school) grants. Unlike loans, grants usually do not have to be repaid, and the right amount of financial aid at a reasonably-priced accredited college may be your ticket to coping with the recession: a higher education credential that will give you a fresh start.