You are a kid on a mountain, born in the outskirts, likely without a silver spoon. In the past you would scale down, find your way to a hub, and require funding.
If I met you I would speak of why I revere professors, think libraries churches, why the expertise and experience available on college campuses in America is priceless. Somewhere here is a school you will think of as made for you, even if you have never herd of it before.
I would still say this. But it would be harder to say not because America has gotten less safe and everyone is chasing admit to the same schools, but because if your path after your degree is going to take you out of the node or back up your mountain, you and your current school need what higher ed has less and less.
Top-notch instructions, groovy lectures, and original source material is all available to you and your peers. And all around you are problems to solve: Food that needs growing, businesses that need help, infrastructure that could use an upgrade.
Yeah, if the problem is "how to I get rich and funnel money to those I think of as mine, then a school that gets you into an America College is, everyone in America thinks, still the way to go. And maybe that will be true forever.
But in the past you needed to be the best and brightest to get that ticket and now you need to be the most by criteria that may not be as useful in terms of fixing problems as growing food, assisting a business, getting your hands dirty fixing the road to school.
That's a reversal. What's more, if you and your school learned how to do this better--solve problems in your village in a way that meant more jobs in the village, you could put it on youtube and work to make what you know go viral.
climb down, get to the ivory Tower and get your degree. Then, if you were so willing, you could go back to your mountain and try to make the village and then return home to make a difference they can get, more or less functionally, what they need without ever leaving. What's more they can show the impact of the work they do to the world. The school that does not burn fossil fuels, that grows healthy food nearby, that serves its neighborhood as much as the chronological future of its students could, demonstrate the value of what it does to the whole world.