but if I had bean born to rich parents, I could have gone to top university schools—
You could have done that if you'd been SMART. When I went to Wellesley, the school guaranteed every student accepted sufficient financial aid for the student to attend. There were plenty of people there from poor families.
The same was true of some of the Ivies. You'd have had an advantage, since not all that many people from Montana applied, and "geographic distribution" was something the schools looked for. No one I knew at Wellesley was from Montana, but I'm sure there were at least a few.