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It may be your income level is too much for a family of (howevermany) for them to offer need-based aid. IIRC, it's pretty much as long as you aren't visibly starving to death or living on the street, you get nothing from big state schools. The benefit of big state schools is, they're cheap. The downside is, getting financial aid out of them is darn near impossible. Sometimes it's cheaper to go to private schools just because they're so much more generous and flexible with the financial aid.
Agree w/ others who said, go to the dean. And start asking the dean about how you can get money for the pre-paid future tuition refunded since you'll be dropping out of college because you're unable the current semester if there's no financial aid for you. A lot of these people seem to take the bill collector attitude that you HAVE the money somewhere, you just don't WANT to give it to them and if they yell at you enough you'll cough up.
Another trick I learned: Never escalate from "I think your employee may be confused" to "Hang on, that doesn't make sense" to "Well, how in the heck am I supposed to..." to "Fine! Give me back all my money then!" Just go straight from "I think your employee may be confused" to "OK, if that's the case then I need to quit school and arrange for a refund on the semesters I've paid for, how do I do that?" Escalation just makes the other person gradually madder and madder. If you go straight to the worst possible outcome, calmly, the person you're arguing with tends to back down or start trying to negotiate.
