There's so much uncertainty over the future of higher education anyway, and the pandemic has just exacerbated that.
There's a lot of lesser-known small private colleges that have been closing (or merged together / acquired by a larger university) and will continue to, which will primarily shrink D3 and NAIA..... Smaller, regional public colleges could also be in trouble. A lot of these schools are in D2 and D3 in leagues like the PSAC, GLIAC, and WIAC. If nothing else I suspect their enrollments will shrink with continued decline of college-aged people which is going to drop off dramatically in the next 5 years as a result of the 2008 recession.
I would think that a lot of community college courses and programs would be offered primarily if not exclusively online in the future. Obviously that's not possible for various programs that lead to careers that can't be done remotely like electricians.... Residential colleges and universities will want to bring back the traditional college experience, of course, but to the extent that happens is uncertain.
On the side of sports, though, I think part of the problem is that a lot of schools have teams that have no chance of being competitive, in some cases even within their own league, much less nationally. For example, a lot of cold-weather schools have no chance of being competitive in baseball, but for some reason they still have teams. A lot of the private colleges would probably be much more likely to become competitive in lacrosse (which still only has ~70 teams in D1) and a lot of the public ones in the Northeast and Midwest could probably be competitive in hockey (eg. Green Bay, Northern Illinois, Buffalo, Binghamton), which still only has ~60 schools between D1 and D2 combined, just as other schools in their conferences already have lacrosse and hockey teams, respectively.
Long Island is kind of an interesting situation. In addition to just adding a hockey program, they had just combined their athletic departments (one of which was already D1 and the other D2) into one D1 program but still split across the two campuses..... I could see the same thing happening with other universities with more than one campus where there isn't a dominant one. For instance, Alaska has had budget problems that could end up shutting down the hockey programs of both Anchorage and Fairbanks (along with other teams). It may be in their best interest to merge athletic departments (even though they're rivals) in order to preserve at least one team in hockey and other sports..... The same thing could happen between merged schools, as well.
