College Kills Souls?

I can be whatever I want to be, right?  My elementary-school guidance counselor told me so.  I can’t help but wonder, however, what she would have said had she known what it was I actually wanted to be: the leader of a nomadic tribe of starving surrealists.  She probably would have told me I was very imaginative, and that I should go to a liberal arts college.  
If only I could go back in time to satisfy my affinity for unsettling people.  That guidance counselor would tell me that I had the all the potential to run the nation one day, and I would respond: “Thanks for your vote of confidence, but I have no plans of becoming a successful member of mainstream society. Sure, I’m vain enough to acknowledge that if I wanted it bad enough, I could be the President of the United States (the trite model for elementary-school motivation), but, as it stands, I am going to withdrawal from this society and its inherent paradigm of productivity.”  
She’d probably laugh, and tell me not to worry; eventually I’d grow up.  I’d find a societal place for my eccentric ideas.     Throughout my childhood, my parents tirelessly praised college as the prerequisite to success and the path to self-discovery.  They were trying to sell me an idea: college is a necessary step in fulfilling your life’s dreams. While I don’t deny that this is the case for some people, I can’t concede that the benefits I’ve experienced from college outweigh my ideological losses.
I’ve just finished my third year at UGA, and, for the first time in my life, I don’t know what I want to be.  College has planted demons of rationality in my brain, and now childhood dreams of being a world-travelling beatnik are being replaced by sound images of a future cursed by an all-encompassing career. A career that I believe will dilute my identity.
College is full of people who have already accepted an active role in society, people who are eagerly willing to play the game of contributing to the overall productivity of the general public. These people measure personal success with six-figure salaries and social influence. I readily admit that without people like these, there wouldn’t be people like me, well-fed daydreamers in a selfish pursuit for self-actualization.  Yes, college introduced me to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
A part of me wants to cross the Sahara on foot and scribble thirst-induced hallucinations in a sketchbook; but that part of me is being suffocated by newly-instilled desires for financial security and comfort.  College is conditioning me to be an active participant in society, by subjecting me, day in and day out, to its standards for success. I’m losing my dreams. I’m resigning to practicality. I’m whining…        
You’re blind if you haven’t detected my acute Peter Pan complex.  Please note, however, that my hesitance with regard to adopting social responsibilities does not discredit my key question: Is reality so damning that we have to convert far-fetched childhood dreams into levelheaded career goals?  I have a hunch that college frames reality for us, and that some of us are unnecessarily abandoning our dreams by adopting the school of thought: “You can be whatever you want to be, as long as there is a major for it.”

(published in Rough Draft)