@ambitionsquared Well, you live with what you have. There are still good merit scholarships out there, and if you make a 35 or higher on the ACT or an equivalent score on the SAT sometimes Alabama will sweeten the pot, including adding a fifth year. Also, you can still apply a year’s worth of OOS tuition to study abroad, it’s just that it’s easier to do with five years instead of four. A lot will depend on whether you would want to take advantage of the free grad school or not. If you look around on this board, there is just a lot of merit aid available for top students.
I stand by my earlier advice that these people need to be notified in writing as to what they have done. You need not be nasty; in fact, be polite. But you just need to point out that this irresponsible behavior may have cost you tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. Based on what you have written, it is almost certain that you would have made NMSF had you not been cheated out of time. You need to make it clear that you were cheated out of something that was rightfully yours and you resent it mightily.
Send your letter to the school board. Maybe even send it to the local paper. Some on this thread don’t think cheating someone out of fifty or a hundred thousand bucks is a big deal, but I do. You owe this to yourself and to future students to do this. But after doing this, the next step is to move on. You are an outstanding student and there is plenty of merit aid out there for you. If you don’t need the merit aid, you have great prospects for getting into a highly selective school. Despite what has happened, you have been blessed with an intellect that is greater than probably 99.8 percent of the nation’s students. With a little luck and a little work you are going to live a very good and charmed life, and you should remember that every time something unexpected comes along and bashes you on the head.
Good luck!