Mila Kunis was only 14 when she landed the role on That ‘70s Show and acting quickly became her full-time job. Did her busy schedule stop her from getting into a good college?
Mila Kunis briefly went to college, but never completed her degree. She went to UCLA before transferring to Loyola Marymount University, but eventually dropped out and decided to stick to acting.
Keep reading to learn more about Mila’s educational background and her college experience.
Mila Kunis’ Early Education
Mila Kunis has a pretty interesting educational background, and not only because she started acting at an early age. She didn’t know a word of English until the age of seven when her family left the Soviet Union and started a new life in Los Angeles.
She enrolled at Rosewood Elementary School only two days after arriving in the US, and it wasn’t exactly a pleasant experience. Her parents told her that she came home crying every day, but Kunis doesn’t even remember this because she completely blocked out this period of her life.
The Golden Globe-nominated star later attended Hubert Howe Bancroft Middle School, and intended to continue her education at the Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, but didn’t stick around for too long. After That ‘70s Show got picked up, her schedule became too hectic, and this school wasn’t flexible about her acting commitments.
Being home-schooled was an option, but Kunis didn’t even consider it because she wanted to make her parents proud by “[graduating] on a stage with everyone else.” She transferred to Fairfax High School, but the fact that she rarely attended classes made her high school experience extremely uncomfortable.
“First of all, you’re in school for a week out of the month at best. So you’re that girl from that show who never shows up to class. You don’t even have a name. That was awful,” she told James Franco in a conversation for Interview Magazine.
Kunis spent her teenage years playing a high school student but didn’t have an ordinary high school experience herself. Unlike her peers, she mostly studied with tutors, barely attended any classes, and never went to prom – but was her time at college any better?
Mila Kunis’ College Experience
Mila Kunis fell in love with acting when she was only nine, and her parents let her do it under one condition. They couldn’t imagine her acting for the rest of her life, so she had to stay in school, get straight As, and go to college one day.
Kunis abided by these rules and graduated from high school with good grades. She started her college essay writing, “Imagine being blind and deaf at age seven” because she felt this way after moving to the US without understanding the culture and knowing the language.
The Black Swan star only attended two classes at UCLA before transferring to Loyola Marymount University. She discussed her college experience with Collider and said that her biggest problem was the lack of direction.
Kunis recalled taking classes that interested her, including a class on Zionist theory, but they weren’t linked to a specific degree. She also considered quitting acting due to fear she’s being “pigeonholed for something specific that [she] didn’t want to be a part of anymore.”
After facing one rejection after another, Kunis finally proved her movie star potential with the role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and other offers started pouring in.
This made her realize that her acting career wasn’t just a phase, but something she wanted to do long-term, and her parents didn’t object when she decided to drop out of college.
“I went to college because I felt like I was supposed to. I graduated from public high school and I did all the things that I was supposed to do… My attempt at college failed miserably and I dropped out and decided that [acting] is what I wanted to do for a living,”
Mila Kunis