Amanda Emery, a junior at the University's Flint campus, was born and raised in a General Motors family.

Her parents both logged more than 30 years on the job for the automotive giant — her mother, Cathy, as a skilled welder in a Flint, Michigan, truck plant and her father, Gary, as a company electrician and supervisor.

Her uncle worked on the assembly line in a GM plant in Flint, and a cousin works on the assembly line at the same Flint factory.

Now retired from GM, Emery's parents live off their company retirement packages, which include monthly income and health insurance for them and their children, among other benefits.

"Basically, you're talking about people that are assured that they're getting their retirement money," she said. "They've worked for it for 30 years; they're thinking their money is safe."

But with GM burning through its cash reserves and teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, the Emery family is facing the possibility that GM veterans Cathy and Gary could soon lose most of their income.

That would leave 29-year-old Emery, a journalism and photography double major, with the responsibility of helping support her family, assisting her mother to make payments for not only her own house but Amanda's grandfather's home in Kentucky and providing some form of health care for Amanda's aging parents. Her father would be able to pick up work somewhere, but her mother would not.

"Somebody would have to pick up the slack, and I'd have to figure something out," she said. "I would have to drop down from (studying) full-time to part-time because I'd have to work more — for sure."

With executives from the Big Three automakers rebuffed in their attempt to obtain critical rescue loans from the federal government, the crisis engulfing the American auto industry has deepened, and its effects can be felt throughout Michigan as more plants shut down and workers lose their jobs.

And what about the impact on students? For them, the future looks increasingly uncertain, with parents subject to layoffs, tuition assistance and scholarship programs getting cut, and an already weakened work force set to lose even more jobs should the auto industry falter even more.

We spoke to more than a half-dozen students whose parents work for one of the Big Three who said they feared for their parents' jobs as automakers continue to trim jobs to stay afloat.

For Dmitry Vodopyanov, 21, a senior at the Ann Arbor campus, each week that goes by holds another chance his father, a Chrysler engineer, could lose his job without any warning.

And what makes the situation even more uncertain, Vodopyanov added, is that his father relies almost entirely on the media to learn about the latest updates on Chrysler's future.

"He's always worried about it," Vodopyanov said. "And if he's stressed, then I'm stressed."

Looking to cut costs, the Big Three have thrown numerous company benefits on the chopping block this year. Among them are tuition assistance programs, which provide employees with money for continuing education classes and degrees.

At the end of October, Chrysler suspended its tuition assistance program for active and laid-off unionized employees. General Motors announced around the same time that it was canceling a similar program for salaried workers by the end of this year.