Oddly enough, I think someone like the author (self-taught background but perhaps lacking fundamentals), would thrive at a top computer science university. Of course, the difficulty is getting in.

My experience at Berkeley is that all of the topic specific classes were very well taught and rigorous. The world-class researchers teaching my classes were usually very good teachers as well. There weren't that many specific requirements, so there was a lot of space to take free electives. I was able to take a couple graduate level courses and they were extremely fascinating (and of course very difficult). Someone like this would thrive because the main bottleneck in many of these classes was still programming aptitude and debugging skill. Many (most?) students have no experience programming before coming to university.

If someone is a poor adult, schools stop considering your parent's finances once you're 24, so financial aid at top universities can also be quite generous in these situations.