I had a lot of college debt. It's very difficult to go to a university that is as expensive as Stanford and then blindly follow your passions when they don't immediately make money out of the gate.
At a lot of college graduations, you'll hear people say, 'Follow your passions,' and that is important, but no one talks about the stress of not having enough money, the issues of debt, and the issues of work stress.
When I went to college, I went to a junior college. I wanted to go to the University of Alabama but had to go to junior college first to get my GPA up. I did a half-year of junior college, then dropped out and had my daughter. College was always an opportunity to go back. But she, my daughter, was my support. I gave up everything for her.
I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out.
I would certainly make the attendance in college paid for, at least at a community college level or a state - you know, a sponsored university level so that if you wanted to go to college and if you had the grades - you might not go to Harvard - but you went to college.
That's another piece of advice: Don't go to college; follow your dreams. Unless you're a doctor - then go to college.
When I was a kid trying to communicate with family in the Soviet Union, it was very difficult. You had to go through the long-distance phone companies like MCI, which were difficult to navigate and expensive to make calls through.
I'm really fortunate to be at Stanford. I go home every 10 weeks, but Stanford apart from being just a wonderful university is one of the places that are part of a great conversation.
It's easy to let your family suffer for your work. Many of us do this because we see our jobs as a means of maintaining our families. We have thoughts such as 'I need to make more money so that my kids can go to college debt-free.'
They were often the first students in their family to go to college and the very idea of higher education was still foreign to them. They had to make a conscious and often difficult decision to come to college.
I want to make college debt-free and for families making less than $125,000, you will not get a tuition bill from a public college or university if the plan that I worked on with Bernie Sanders is enacted.
I was definitely planning to go to college, but I deferred my admission to Carnegie Mellon to be in a non-equity tour of 'The Sound of Music.' But I made very little money in the tour, and college is really expensive, and I thought I'd never be able to pay off those loans.
As a small child in England, I had this dream of going to Africa. We didn't have any money and I was a girl, so everyone except my mother laughed at it. When I left school, there was no money for me to go to university, so I went to secretarial college and got a job.
College is expensive; I always knew that, and I wanted to make money, partially to spend a little of it here and there, but primarily for a college savings fund.
Anytime I have communicated with college-going people, fresh out of college, looking for a job - money is very important, that is just so important. What is not important is how do you plan to live your life or the larger picture. Not that I had such philosophical intentions when I was 18, but I think there was lesser importance for money.
I wanted to make money very fast, and I was completely confused after college. I didn't know what career options I had. And then I had this entry point in the film industry, and I thought, 'If this is where the fast money is going to come from, let's see how it goes.'
It's a little hard to go out there and spend your money on a home, car, or goods and services if your wages are being garnished to make debt collectors rich.