To make it in Hollywood, you don’t exactly need a college degree. However, some of the most famous celebs earned one and are proud of it! Wonderwall.com is taking a look at some of our favorite stars and checking out what they call their alma mater, starting with Kourtney Kardashian, who’s the only one of her sisters to have graduated from college! Kourtney has a bachelor’s degree in theater arts with a minor in Spanish from the University of Arizona. However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing for her at school. “I failed two classes in college because I was too nervous to give speeches,” she confessed to Us Weekly in 2010.
For more of your favorite celebrities with college degrees, keep reading…
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In 1993, Amy Poehler got her degree from Boston College. When speaking at nearby Harvard University in 2011, she joked about her school, quipping to graduates, “I graduated from Boston College, which some call ‘The Harvard of Boston.'”
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John Krasinski calls Brown University his alma mater: He graduated from the Ivy League school in 2001. “It was without a doubt the beginning of everything,” he said of his college experience when he addressed Brown’s Class of 2019 graduates as the baccalaureate speaker. “For the next four years, I wanted to be part of it all. I formed a new way of thinking, a new way of executing those thoughts. I leapt out of my comfort zone, then stayed there, then leapt again… I took chances, I failed and I took more chances.”
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Tina Fey graduated from the University of Virginia in 1992. “I always felt like my UVA experience was kind of fun, like going to school abroad,” she’s said of her experience. “There was a somewhat conservative environment at Virginia, and then the drama department was just a bit different. It was this little insular community.”
Tom Hanks described himself as “an underachieving student with lousy SAT scores” in a New York Times op-ed in 2015. He started out in community college and then transferred to California State University, Sacramento, where back then he said tuition was $95 a semester –”just barely affordable.”
Matthew McConaughey is such a loyal alum of the University of Texas at Austin that he became a professor of practice at the Moody College of Communication, which is part of the Department of Radio-Television-Film, at the school back in 2019 after being a visiting instructor since 2015.
Carrie Underwood took a break from college to audition for “American Idol” but went on to finish school in 2006, graduating from Oklahoma’s Northeastern State University magna cum laude with a bachelor of arts degree in mass communications with an emphasis in journalism.
Kerry Washington graduated from Georgetown University in 1998. She spoke at the school’s commencement in 2013 and was named an honorary doctor of fine arts.
Jennifer Garner earned her diploma from Ohio’s Denison University in 1994. In an interview with the school’s paper, The Denisonian, she explained how the university prepared her for a life in Hollywood. “People who went to conservatories and performing art schools couldn’t be in main stage productions until their junior or senior year but here I was around a community of serious performers that could dive into this as early as freshman year,” she said. “Luckily, I was always on stage and there’s nothing more valuable than that.”
Octavia Spencer is a 1994 graduate of Auburn University. She was honored by the school as an Auburn Alumni Association Young Alumni Award recipient in 2012 and in 2020, she received a lifetime achievement award from the Auburn Alumni Association.
Smartypants John Legend enrolled at an Ivy League school — the University of Pennsylvania — when he was 16. While there, he became the musical director and president of a co-ed a cappella music group called Counterparts.
Mindy Kaling is a proud Dartmouth alumna who graduated from the school in 2001. “I started thinking about college pretty young, and it was a big part of my friend group — going to college was important to us,” she told The Dartmouth in 2020. “For a lot of nerds — regardless of your race or your identity — that becomes your focus once you turn 13 or 14. I also think that getting into an Ivy League school was a real point of pride for my parents and I was a real people-pleasing kid, so I wanted them to be proud of me.”
Denzel Washington finished his studies at Fordham University in 1977. In 2011, he established a scholarship fund at the school as well as an endowed chair.
In 1996, actress Elizabeth Banks earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Pennsylvania — an Ivy League school. While stumping for politician Hillary Clinton in the state in 2016, she told Philly Magazine, “I feel very connected to Philly, because I went to Penn, and Pennsylvania’s such an important state.”
Adam Sandler’s experience at New York University (he graduated in 1988) was not the most supportive. In a joint interview for “Variety Studios: Actors on Actors,” fellow star Brad Pitt explained what he’d heard about Adam’s time in college. “You were at NYU, and it was your acting coach, or acting professor, I believe. He took you out for a beer and he kindly said to you, ‘Think about something else. Listen, you got heart, but you don’t have it. Choose another path,'” he said. “You ran into him when you were getting the ultimate payday, you were with a bunch of friends. Anyone would think, that’s the opportunity to rub it in his face. Reportedly, what you did was, you said hi and you introduced him to your friends and you said, ‘This is the only teacher to ever buy me a beer.’ That’s the guy I know, and I think that’s why you’re here after all these years.”
Sandra Bullock attended North Carolina’s East Carolina University between 1982 and 1986 and appeared in plays like “The Three Sisters,” “Peter Pan” and “Stage Door” while earning her degree.
Will Ferrell is a University of Southern California alum who graduated from the school with a degree in sports information. “While I had an interest in pursuing sportscasting, my gut was telling me that I really wanted to pursue something else. And that something else was comedy,” he said when he delivered the 2017 commencement speech at his alma mater. “I was always trying to make my friends laugh whenever I could find a moment.”
Beanie Feldstein studied sociology at Wesleyan University, graduating from the school in 2015. In an interview with The Wesleyan Argus in the spring of her senior year, she explained why she didn’t opt to be a theatre major. “I was like, ‘You know what? I have my whole life and my whole outside-of-school life to shape around acting.’ I was like, ‘Why don’t I just take this time to really learn about something and really think about something that I don’t often think about or I didn’t grow up thinking about?'”
Ken Jeong earned his undergraduate degree from Duke University and then went to medical school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His loyalty is with Duke however, as he explained in a 2017 interview with The Undefeated. “The rivalry still runs deep. It still matters. You can get mellow about it, but it still flares up. I was bummed out when we lost,” Ken explained. “I get over it really quickly because I’m older, but yeah, it’s a bummer.”
Meryl Streep attended Vassar College — and graduated cum laude. She followed that up with a master’s in fine arts from Yale University.
Before she was reading scripts, Renee Zellweger was reading literature, earning a degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin in 1992. While in school, she took a drama class that sparked her interest in acting.
In 1985, Lisa Kudrow graduated from Vassar College. She studied biology and after graduation did scientific research with her physician dad while she started to perform and soon found she had a greater love for acting.
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