In 1994 Gyllenhaal appeared in an episode of Homicide: Life on the Street that was directed by his father. After graduating from Harvard-Westlake School in 1998, Gyllenhaal attended Columbia University for two years before dropping out to pursue acting.
The younger of the Gyllenhaal siblings also attended Columbia University. However, he did not graduate due to his steady rise to fame in Hollywood. He attended Columbia for two years before dropping out to fully pursue a career in entertainment.
Gyllenhaal graduated from the Harvard-Westlake School in Los Angeles in 1998, then attended Columbia University, where his sister was a senior and from which his mother had graduated, to study Eastern religions and philosophy. At Columbia, he was a resident of John Jay Hall.
He only completed high school with the help of a tutor and never attended college. The A-lister has starred in hits including “Titanic,” “The Great Gatsby,” “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and “The Revenant”—the last of which earned him his first Oscar after multiple nominations.
If it were the only option, then everyone who didn't go to college would be a failure, right? We know that isn't true, because we've all heard the dropout-to-billionaire stories of tech geniuses like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.
The wealthiest person in the country to have made a fortune without attending college is oil tycoon Harold Hamm. The youngest of 13 children, Hamm grew up on a farm in Oklahoma, picking cotton as a child and working at a gas station as a teenager.
Who is the most successful person without a college degree?
Bill Gates is one of the richest men who did not complete his college education. He dropped out of Harvard University to co-found Microsoft, becoming one of the most successful entrepreneurs in history.
While in high school, Tom wanted to become a priest but pretty soon he developed an interest in acting and abandoned his plans of becoming a priest, dropped out of school, and at age 18 headed for New York and a possible acting career. The next 15 years of his life are the stuff of legends.
Tom Cruise left high school to pursue acting in New York.
Growing up, Cruise aspired to become a priest. But after partaking in acting classes and performances throughout his childhood, he changed his career path, left high school (a Franciscan seminary) after a year, and moved to NYC to pursue acting full time.
She also references Jake failing to show up at her 21st birthday party in December 2010 — an anecdote that has been recounted multiple times in other songs and interviews, with Taylor describing being stood up by her boyfriend as "the worst experience ever."
At Kickapoo High School, Pitt was involved in sports, debating, student government and school musicals. Pitt attended the University of Missouri, where he majored in journalism with a focus on advertising. He occasionally acted in fraternity shows.
He began studying at the Santa Monica High School but dropped out four years later and moved to New York in order to pursue a career in acting. Robert Downey Jr.
The year he earned a bachelor's degree in theater from Fordham, he was cast in the television film Wilma. But it was his stage performance in A Soldier's Play that impressed NBC's St. Elsewhere producers, who cast him as Dr. Phillip Chandler in the hit series.
He developed an idiosyncratic accent because, as a child, he thought having a Canadian accent did not sound "tough". He began to model his accent on that of Marlon Brando. Gosling dropped out of high school at age 17 to focus on his acting career.
Although Hanks' family religious history was Catholic and Mormon, as an adult he converted to Greek Orthodox Christianity after his marriage to Rita Wilson.
When Carrey was a teenager, his father lost his job. The family moved from Newmarket to a suburb of Toronto. To help make ends meet, Carrey quit school and took a job as a janitor.
Cruise spent his childhood trying to hide his dyslexia from his peers. Diagnosed at the age of seven, Cruise describes his younger self as a "functional illiterate". He could barely read in high school or through his earliest roles.
Drew was emancipated when she was only 14 years old and didn't earn her high school diploma. Drew invited three Drew Barrymore Show viewers to create “Drew & Ru's Back-to-School Crew”. The first adult learner earning her GED credential alongside Drew is Anissa a 50-year-old from Florida.
Young stardom made pursuing college a distant dream for Swift, but she graduated high school even while on tour for her first album. The artist does not have a college degree, but she has personally supported students struggling with paying their tuition.
Elon Musk went to Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada, and then transferred to the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he received bachelor's degrees in physics and economics in 1997.
