Help! Advice! Please! Anyone?!

<p>I went to a tiny liberal arts school for 3 semesters. During the last semester I had a lot of horrible stuff happen outside of school and failed one class due to attendance (I managed to hang on to the others.) My GPA isn't great because of that one class, everything else is Bs and even a few As. That's also the reason I have only 3 semesters instead of two full years.
My high school GPA is an unweighted 3.8, weighted 4.something, AP and honors classes, I was in the top 10%, and an early graduate (class of 2006 instead of 2007.)</p>

<p>I live in Chicago, so I applied to Loyola and Depaul and got into both. Loyola was offering me the most financial aid, so I was going to go with them. Then, a lot of that financial aid didn't come through, so I couldn't attend. (EFC = 0, and that is the absolute truth.)
This happened about a month ago, so I decided to attend a city college (community college) to get some gen eds that my previous tiny school didn't offer (they have a non-traditional curriculum so I needed English 101 and so on.) I did my placement test, and got placed into the highest classes. Went through registration, and had more financial aid issues. These issues were more on the college's end than mine or the governments. They're just idiots.</p>

<p>Anyway, I don't think I can go to school this semester.</p>

<p>What should I do?
Apply for schools for the spring? Will anyone accept my low GPA? Will it help if I send in my high school transcript and maybe an explanation of what happened that year? </p>

<p>What are some schools that don't lie to you about financial aid, and that really try to help? (My previous school was amazing with financial aid, so I wasn't expecting others to be so bad.)</p>

<p>You may be asking why I left that school, and the simple answer is that I want to major in linguistics and study languages. I can't do either there. The only schools in Chicago I can major in linguistics at I have no chance of getting into, so I'm looking elsewhere. Any good recommendations?</p>

<p>People take semesters off from college all the time. </p>

<p>I would check out your in state options.</p>