What's a Degree Worth: Study the Movie Stars

Jun 25, 2011
John Willingham

Meryl Streep - i-stock photo

Many now question the value of a college degree. Read how Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Tommy Lee Jones, and Jodie Foster show the true value of a degree.

Despite what some people are saying these days about the declining value of a college degree, some of the most famous people on the planet—Meryl Streep, Emma Thompson, Tommy Lee Jones, and Jodie Foster—show us that the full college experience can transform your life, inspire your work, and develop the intellect and independence necessary to direct your own future.

These and other celebrities who have graduated from college also prove that the most important reason to earn a degree is not necessarily to make money. Some had already made a fortune before they even finished college.

Instead, all these celebrities embraced the adventure of attending college: we cannot truly know what college can do for us until we try it.

Meryl Streep: the Sense of Identity

Of her experience at Vassar College, Meryl Streep remembers that "How we looked was not important; instead how we thought was more important. How we argued, learned, discovered, laughed and joked mattered. I felt like a human being, not a woman or child, and felt the quality of my own character."

Streep wasn’t the only one who felt the quality of her character. Recalling Streep’s audition for the extremely demanding role of Julie in Strindberg’s play Miss Julie, Professor Evert Sprinchorn, the head of Vassar's Drama Department, said, "After about 10 minutes, I saw that Meryl was just outstanding. It hit you right in the eye."

How could such a young student, with little experience, do so well? Being a great natural actress was an obvious asset, but there was also this: "At Vassar,” Streep said, “it was commonplace to give your best shot, so that it became a habit. I learned to believe in myself. I acquired a genuine sense of identity. "

Emma Thompson: the Passion for Justice

At Cambridge University in England, Emma Thompson read English literature, an experience that clearly contributed to both her acting and screenwriting careers.

In the Mike Nichols film Wit, Thompson not only co-wrote the teleplay with Nichols (an adaptation of the play by Margaret Edson), but she also played the lead role—a professor of English at a prestigious university who is scholar on the works of the poet John Donne.

Six years earlier, in 1995, Thompson had written the brilliant academy award winning screenplay for Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, based on the Jane Austen novel.

The most important literary influence on Thompson at Cambridge, however, was the 19th Century British novelist George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans), author of Middlemarch and Silas Marner, among others.

In an excellent article for the The Guardian in October 2007, Madeline Bunting wrote that the point where Thompson’s “sense of justice came into focus” was at Cambridge.

At Cambridge, Bunting wrote, Thompson “discovered two major influences: George Eliot and feminist criticism. She was plunged into a 19th-century moral universe and, at the same time, filled with a rage against the injustice done to women down the ages.

“[George] Eliot did exactly what Thompson is talking about; she used the human love of stories and our curiosity about character to stretch our capacity for empathy to moral purpose.”

Tommy Lee Jones: the Legacy of a Writer

When Tommy Lee Jones came to Harvard from a small town in Texas in 1965, the story of what happened next would make a good movie in itself. Jones roomed with Al Gore, became friends with Professor Erich Segal, and played offensive tackle for the Harvard football team that “won” the famous Harvard-Yale game of 1968 by scoring 16 points--with less than a minute left in the game--to tie the score at 29-29.

And then, to top it off, Jones got his first movie part in Segal’s Love Story in 1970, the year after he graduated from Harvard.

But did that really “top off” Jones’ Harvard career? Jones graduated cum laude from Harvard with a degree (like Emma Thompson) in English. His senior thesis, one of his last accomplishments at Harvard, was on the role of Catholicism in the short fiction of Georgia writer Flannery O’Connor.

Jones returned to Harvard for a screening of his 2005 film and directorial debut, The Three Burials of Manuel Estrada. In an interview in 2006 with Boston Globe writer Sam Allis, Jones said that ''O'Connor is important to the way this movie is constructed. What you do is you consider some so-called religious thinking without the didacticism of the classical approach.

“You look for the allegorical intentions of what we're taught in the Bible, and then find some way to have it revealed or expressed by common experience.

“You'll find this happening over and over again in O'Connor, who was a rather classical Catholic thinker who wrote about nothing but backwoods north Georgia rednecks."

The substance of his Harvard senior thesis stayed with the famous actor for 36 years, and shaped his artistic convictions. And that is in addition to the amazing contacts and friendships he made.

Jodie Foster: the Kick-Ass Life

The story of Jodie Foster’s enrollment at Yale after she had already won an academy award is well-known, perhaps for the wrong reason. Foster’s stalker John Hinckley spent time on the Yale campus in order to pursue his obsession with Foster.

And that is sad indeed, because Jodie Foster brought a strong commitment to her college study of French, partly because her mother, a single parent, was a devoted Francophile.

Foster told Marie-Noelle Tranchant of Le Figaro, in February 2011, that her mother “dreamed about Europe and France, drove a Peugeot and took me to see French films which imbued me with a sense of this country.”

When Foster went to Yale after great success in film, studying French not only deepened her understanding of the language but also cemented its place in her emotional and intellectual life because of its powerful resonances with her past.

And as a result of her Yale experience, Foster also found a stronger focus for the future, one that emerged from the freedom she felt at the university. Speaking at the Yale commencement on May 23, 1993, she told the new graduates that Yale had given her “the luxury of choice. I’ve chosen to make my life, my work, my love, my characters stand for something, however small and insignificant that legacy may be.”

What Foster chose for her life was to tell stories that matter. “That’s my Olympic event” she said. “That’s the revolution I choose to fight in. And you’re no good to the revolution if you’re dead or unprepared."

“Now you have fun,” she told the graduates. “Breathe deeply and kick ass in the process.”