$50K/year is an elite university. The bulk of your high school peers would be going to State U and would be talking about it. It'd be like buying a Mercedes because you don't know about Fords. I find this hard to believe.
This wasn't hard information to come by.
It's hard to believe you didn't know about your home state university. Your athlete friends surely followed the fortunes of their football team. Around here the State U team is constantly in the newspaper and on the nightly local TV news sports roundup. This has been true in every place I've lived in, decades before the internet.