Jake Stevens isn’t a typical college student. When the 19-year-old mechanical engineering major isn’t in class or working a full-time job at an automotive company, he spends most of his time worrying about where he’ll sleep next.

“It’s kind of stressful,” says Stevens, who grew up in Tampa Bay, Fla. “If I’m working really late at school, I’ll just take a nap in one of the computer labs or something. If I can get out early enough, I’ll go to a friend’s house.”

Even after he maxes out his federal student loan allotment, Pell grant, scholarships and the college fund his mother painstakingly built from the time he was in diapers, Stevens is still thousands of dollars short of meeting tuition requirements at his private Flint, Mich., engineering school.

His school of choice, Kettering University, is known for its unique curriculum, in which students alternate between two three-month terms in class and two three-month terms working full-time jobs in the field of their choice. Stevens earns $16 an hour (double the national minimum wage) and gets free housing from his employer while working. After each three-month stint on the job, he should be more than capable of affording an apartment back on campus. Instead, he has to save 90% of his pay to cover the next term’s tuition.

“I didn’t want to give up my dreams just because I couldn’t afford tuition,” he says.

So he decided to cut the only expense he could — housing.

When saving isn’t enough

View photos Photo: Jake Stevens More

From the time he was 12 years old, Stevens has been planning his career as a engineer.

His mother, a schoolteacher, made sure he knew his ambitions wouldn’t take him far without a proper education. So when Stevens wasn’t tinkering with household appliances and running rogue chemistry experiments out of the family bathroom, he was researching the best engineering programs in the country and bookmarking scholarship applications.

After years of research, Stevens finally settled on two top-choice schools – Harvard and Kettering University. Kettering, formerly the General Motors Institute, is known as a feeder school for both Stanford and Harvard’s graduate programs.

While Stevens packed his schedule with enough extracurriculars to rival any Ivy League hopeful, his mother opened a college savings plan in his name, along with funds for his three younger siblings. Even after the 2008 financial crisis all but destroyed her husband’s business as a commercial real estate investor, Stevens’ mother took on two part-time jobs and kept saving.

“We told him we’d give him as much as we could,” his mother, Gina Christian, says. “We want all of our children to go to college and be successful."

Stevens was waitlisted at Harvard but gladly accepted an offer from his No. 2 choice, Kettering. For his parents, who would have much preferred for Stevens to stay in state, it was a bittersweet moment.

His college savings fund would have been been enough to pay for tuition at a state school, but it covered only a fraction of the yearly $37,000 tuition at Kettering ($43,000 if he wanted room and board and a meal plan).While some parents could have offered to help by co-signing private student loans or taking out federal Parent PLUS loans to fill in the tuition gap, their credit was so badly damaged during the recession that they were unable to qualify.

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