(MONEY Magazine) – At 24, Kyle Lewis is about to realize a high school dream. This fall, after graduating from Boston's Northeastern University, she expects to start work as a chemical engineer at a salary of at least $35,000. But at what cost! She's $22,000 in debt and so worried about meeting her loan payments -- $280 a month for the next 10 years -- that she plans to move in with her mother, a police dispatcher, and her father, a retired architect, in Teaneck, N.J. Kyle chose Northeastern (tuition, room and board: $16,500) to take advantage of its unusual co-op program, in which students spend seven 13-week quarters in jobs or internships related to their career interests. Kyle, for example, helped develop an athlete's-foot medication for Schering-Plough and create (still secret) flavors of Kool-Aid and Maxwell House coffee for General Foods. She entered Northeastern in 1984 with a financial aid package consisting of % a $1,000 merit scholarship, $5,300 in government and school loans and a $1,000 work/study assignment; her parents kicked in about $5,000 a year to make up the balance. Everything went along smoothly until Kyle's brother graduated from Morehouse College in 1988: Northeastern cut her aid by $4,000 for what would have been her fifth and final year, on the theory that her parents could pay more of her expenses. Her parents, however, decided that they couldn't continue to contribute even the $5,000 they had been paying. She took on a third job, working for a pastor at a local church, in addition to her two clerical jobs on campus, putting in a total of almost 30 hours a week. Even so, she could not come up with enough money and had to drop out. ''I didn't feel it was a disaster, because many people need to take time off to earn money,'' she says. She left school for two years, working as a concierge at a Boston condominium and as a telephone fund raiser for Northeastern. ''I had been on a very rigid technical track,'' she says. ''During my time off I did mosaics, I studied marine life. I needed that.'' Before returning to Northeastern, Kyle pleaded with the financial aid officer for more help. The outcome: an additional $1,500-a-year loan plus a $1,000 annual stipend for heading the Black Student Association. And during her time away from school, she was able to drum up three scholarships (two intended specifically for minority students) for a total of $3,500. The extra funds, plus the $150 a week from two part-time clerical jobs, enabled her to pay for her senior year. There are days when Kyle thinks she should have chosen a cheaper school, perhaps Spelman, a black women's college in Atlanta (current tuition, room and board: $11,727). ''Going to Spelman would have reduced my debt by 60%,'' she says. But she wouldn't have gained the co-op job experience that, she recognizes, taught her workplace etiquette and interview techniques that should boost her career. ''There's no question that Northeastern made me a better job candidate,'' she says, ''and that's going to pay off in the long run.''