Jessica Biel Regretted Dropping out of College for Acting
Jessica Biel made a lot of sacrifices to develop her acting career. One of those involved discontinuing her college education. Despite her accomplishments, Biel would’ve most likely returned to finish her degree if she could.
Why finishing college was important to Jessica Biel
Biel attended Tufts University in Massachusetts from 2000 to 2002. However, she took a hiatus from college to star in her 2003 horror film The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. The break was only supposed to be temporary as Biel still had her sights set on collecting her degree someday.
“I definitely expect to go back to college,” she once told IGN. “It’s really, really important for me personally. I want that degree. I want those classes. I always feel… after the semester’s done I go home and I find myself talking to my parents, “Mom, Napoleon did this!” Like all this stuff I never knew anything about and I’m just rattling it off and feeling very confident and smart — that I can talk to anybody about so many different subjects. And that feels really good to me. I want that.”
In another interview with Pop Entertainment, the 7th Heaven star even predicted she would regret it if she didn’t finish university.
“I left before picking a major so I was taking classes that were just interesting. I would love to go back. It’s important for me to finish and I don’t know why. If I don’t do it, then I will regret it. My younger brother is in college and he will graduate before me. That pisses me off,” she said.
It turned out that was exactly what would happen. Biel’s acting career seemed to pull her in too many directions to finish school. Aside from the education, perhaps what she missed most about college were the memories she could’ve created like her peers did.
“I wish I could have had that time that my girlfriends all had,” Biel once told Allure (via Digital Spy). “I wish I would have lived in that crappy, nasty brownstone they all lived in. If I had to do it again, I would have stuck around and finished it out.”
Why Jessica Biel didn’t want to finish college at Tufts
After her sometimes unnerving shoot with Wesley Snipes in Blade Trinity, Biel seemed to consider returning to college. If Biel had gone back to college, it was unlikely she’d return to Tufts University. She was strongly considering transferring to another university. Although LA might’ve been most convenient given her Hollywood career, she didn’t want to finish her degree in California, either.
“I don’t know when I’m going to do this. I hope it doesn’t just go on and on and years and years go by and I’m still going to do it,” Biel once said in an interview with MovieWeb. “I’d like to finish it somewhere like NYU or something. I’d love to go to NY and just kind of go for a couple of years because I’d like to live there anyway before I have a family or anything like that.”
As for why Biel wouldn’t return to Tufts, she confided that everyone she was close to graduated from the university already. Biel, who already proved she could shine solo, felt this meant she could go to another school with a completely fresh start.
“I would if my friends were all still there,” Biel said. “I went for a year, took a year off, and went back again and now they’ve all graduated. So, for me to go back to Medford, Mass., where I don’t know anybody anymore, it’s like starting as a freshman all over again and like to choose something else, like go to NYU where I can live in an apartment and not have to be on campus, or, I don’t know, I wouldn’t completely write off CA schools because there are some great schools here, but I don’t know. I’ve always had an affiliation of school equals East Coast. I don’t know why.”
