If you're interested in technology and/or entrepreneurship, go to one of the highly-rated schools you named. Stanford, CMU, MIT are all great choices if you're up to the rigor and competition. At the very least, it will get you out of your current backwater (I know the area, I grew up in Western PA and my mother lived in Buffalo for about a decade) and you'll make friends and connections that will last you for a long time.

You might be wrong about what precisely you want to do with your career, too. Maybe Javascript hacking is the most interesting thing you can do where you are, but will pale in comparison with the kinds of stuff you could do at a big research university.

The truth of the matter is if you go to a top tier school and major in cs or engineering, you will be fine money-wise. It's not engineers who are suffering after college. Grit your teeth and take out some loans, however scary that seems now.

Also, if you want to do startups there's a lot more access to capital when you go to the Stanford/MIT/CMUs of the world.

If you hate college after a year or two, then you can alway drop out and work. It's much harder to do it the other way around because the whole admissions system is built around receiving kids straight out of high school.