Business as usual: family heritage

I definitely spent a tremendous amount of time on school: elementary, high school and then college. My family, of course, wanted me to go to college so badly that I didn't even think of questioning that. It was always a given. This is not my personal tale, even though I made it sound like it. This is the tale of the contemporary young man or woman.
Here's what I think our parents had in mind: you need to go to college to get anything better than a hamburger-flipping job. You wanna know what? They're probably right. But that doesn't mean an important part of what we are hasn't been butchered in the process.