Colleges Recommended by Steven Spielberg: Embracing the "Spielberg Effect"
Many students aspire to attend prestigious universities, dreaming of a future shaped by an Ivy League education or acceptance into a top-tier film school. However, rejection from these institutions can feel like a devastating blow, casting doubt on their ambitions. The story of Greg Forbes Siegman and the experiences of Steven Spielberg offer a powerful counter-narrative, highlighting that success is not solely determined by the name on a diploma.
The Crushing Disappointment and the Unexpected Turn
Greg Forbes Siegman, a bright and ambitious high school senior in 1990, had his sights set on an Ivy League school or Stanford. His impressive academic record and extracurricular activities seemed to pave the way for a promising future in law or film. However, a series of rejection letters from selective colleges shattered his dreams. Adding insult to injury, a teacher, tasked with writing recommendations, expressed doubts about Siegman's intellectual capacity to thrive at such institutions.
This setback, however, proved to be a catalyst for extraordinary achievements. At the age of twenty-four, while working as a part-time restaurant doorman and substitute teacher in a low-income neighborhood in Chicago, Siegman founded brunchbunch.com, a mentoring program connecting young professionals with young people in need of guidance. This initiative evolved into the 11-10-02 Foundation, which raised over $250,000 to support its cause and established the ShakingUpChicago.com Scholarship Program, awarding college grants. Siegman's dedication to public service earned him accolades, including recognition as a real-life American hero by Hasbro in 1999 and the distinction of being the youngest adult honored at the National Jefferson Awards for Public Service in 2000.
Despite initial setbacks, Siegman's determination led him to Tulane University and later, Northwestern University, where he achieved an exceptional academic record. Yet, despite his academic success at Northwestern, Siegman felt unfulfilled and longed for the vibrancy and community engagement he experienced at Tulane. This realization underscored the importance of finding an environment that aligns with one's passions and values, rather than solely pursuing prestige. When Prairie State College in Chicago Heights invited him to be its graduation speaker, he embraced the opportunity, recognizing it as a significant milestone in his journey.
The "Spielberg Effect": Success Beyond Rejection
The experiences of Siegman echo a phenomenon identified by economists Alan Krueger and Stacy Dale, who studied the long-term outcomes of students rejected by elite colleges. Their research revealed that, in many cases, these students achieved similar levels of success in their careers and lives as those who were accepted into prestigious institutions. Dale and Krueger termed this the "Spielberg effect," named after Steven Spielberg, who was rejected from the film school at UCLA and instead attended California State University, Long Beach.
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Steven Allan Spielberg, born on December 18, 1946, is an American filmmaker. A major figure of the New Hollywood era and pioneer of the modern blockbuster, Spielberg is widely regarded as one of the greatest and most influential filmmakers in the history of cinema and is the highest-grossing film director of all time. Among other accolades, he has received three Academy Awards, four Golden Globe Awards and three BAFTA Awards, as well as the AFI Life Achievement Award in 1995, an honorary knighthood in 2001, the Kennedy Center Honor in 2006, the Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2009, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015, and the National Medal of Arts in 2023.
Spielberg's early life was marked by a passion for filmmaking. He moved to California and studied film in college. After directing several episodes for television, including Night Gallery and Columbo, he directed the television film Duel (1971), which was approved by Barry Diller. He made his theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), also beginning his decades-long collaboration with composer John Williams, with whom he has worked with for all but five of his theatrical releases. He became a household name with the summer blockbuster Jaws (1975), and continuously directed more acclaimed escapist box-office blockbusters with Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (1982) and the original Indiana Jones trilogy (1981-1989). In 1993, Spielberg directed back-to-back hits with the science fiction thriller Jurassic Park, the highest-grossing film ever at the time, and the epic historical drama Schindler's List, which has often been listed as one of the greatest films ever made. He won the Academy Award for Best Director for the latter as well as for the World War II epic Saving Private Ryan (1998). Spielberg has since directed the science fiction films A.I.
Spielberg co-founded Amblin Entertainment and DreamWorks Pictures, and he has served as a producer for many successful films and television series, among them Poltergeist (1982), Gremlins (1984), Back to the Future (1985), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988) and Band of Brothers (2001).
Spielberg's upbringing in a Jewish family also influenced his life and work. Spielberg was born on December 18, 1946, in Cincinnati, Ohio. His mother, Leah Adler (née Posner), was a concert pianist and ran a kosher dairy restaurant, and his father, Arnold, was an electrical engineer involved in the development of computers. His immediate family were Reform Jewish/Orthodox Jewish. Spielberg's paternal grandparents were Jews from Ukraine; his grandmother Rebecca (née Chechik), was from Sudylkiv, and his grandfather Shmuel Spielberg was from Kamianets-Podilskyi. Spielberg has three younger sisters: Anne, Sue, and Nancy. At their home in Cincinnati, his grandmother taught English to Holocaust survivors. They, in turn, taught him numbers: One man in particular, I kept looking at his numbers-his number tattooed on his forearm … he started - you know, when-during the dinner break, when everybody was eating and not learning, he would point to the numbers. And he would say, that is a two, and that is a four. And then he'd say, and this is a eight, and that's a one. And I'll never forget this. And he said, and that's a nine. And then he crooked his arm and inverted his arm and said, and see, it becomes a six. It's magic. And now it's a nine, and now it's a six, and now it's a nine and now it's a six. And that's really how I learned my numbers for the first time …
In 1952, his family moved to Haddon Township, New Jersey, after his father was hired by RCA. Spielberg attended Hebrew school from 1953 to 1957, in classes taught by Rabbi Albert L. Lewis. In early 1957, the family moved to Phoenix, Arizona. Spielberg had a bar mitzvah ceremony when he was thirteen. His family was involved in the synagogue and had many Jewish friends. Of the Holocaust, he said that his parents "talked about it all the time, and so it was always on my mind". His father had lost between sixteen and twenty relatives in the Holocaust. Spielberg found it difficult accepting his heritage; he said: "It isn't something I enjoy admitting … but when I was seven, eight, nine years old, God forgive me, I was embarrassed because we were Orthodox Jews. I was embarrassed by the outward perception of my parents' Jewish practices. I was never really ashamed to be Jewish, but I was uneasy at times." Spielberg was the target of anti-Semitism: "In high school, I got smacked and kicked around. Two bloody noses.
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Spielberg recalls his parents taking him to see Cecil B. DeMille's The Greatest Show on Earth (1952). He had never seen a movie before, and thought they were taking him to the circus. He was terrified by the movie's train crash, and at age 12, he recreated it with his Lionel trains and filmed it. He recalls: "The trains went around and around, and after a while that got boring, and I had this eight-millimeter camera, and I staged a train wreck and filmed it. That was hard on the trains, but then I could cut the film lots of different ways and look at it over and over again." This was his first home movie. In 1958, he became a Boy Scout, eventually attaining the rank of Eagle Scout. He fulfilled a requirement for the photography merit badge by making a nine-minute 8 mm Western, The Last Gunfight. Spielberg used his father's movie camera to make amateur features, and began taking the camera along on every Scout trip. At age 13, Spielberg made a 40-minute war film, Escape to Nowhere, with a cast of classmates. The film won first prize in a statewide competition. Throughout his early teens, and after entering high school, Spielberg made about fifteen to twenty 8 mm adventure films. He recalls that my dad told me stories about World War II constantly … I knew, based on the stories my dad and his friends were telling about World War II, that there was no glory in war. And it was ugly, and it was cruel … it was, you know, visually devastating.
In Phoenix, Spielberg went to the local theater every Saturday. Formative films included Victor Fleming's Captains Courageous (1937), Walt Disney's Pinocchio and Fantasia (both 1940), Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon (1950) and The Seven Samurai (1954), Ishirō Honda's Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (1956), David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) ("the film that set me on my journey"), Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) and Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove (1964) and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) ("I'm still living off the adrenalin that … I experienced watching that film for the first time.") He attended Arcadia High School in 1961 for three years. In 1963, he wrote and directed a 140-minute science fiction film, Firelight, the basis of Close Encounters of the Third Kind. After taking a tour bus to Universal Studios, a chance conversation with an executive led to Spielberg getting a three-day pass to the premises. On the fourth day, he walked up to the studio gates without a pass, and the security guard waved him in: "I basically spent the next two months at Universal Studios … that was how I became an unofficial apprentice that summer." His family later moved to Saratoga, California, where he attended Saratoga High School. A year later, his parents divorced. Spielberg moved to Los Angeles to stay with his father, while his three sisters and mother remained in Saratoga. He recalls: My parents split up when I was 15 or 16 years old, and I needed a special friend, and had to use my imagination to take me to places that felt good - that helped me move beyond the problems my parents were having, and that ended our family as a whole. And thinking about that time, I thought, an extraterrestrial character would be the perfect springboard to purge the pain of your parents' splitting up. He recalls his mother had "a huge adventurous personality. We always saw her as Peter Pan, the kid who never wanted to grow up, and she sort of saw herself that way. I think my mom lived a lot of childhoods in her ninety-seven years."
Spielberg wasn't initially interested in academics, aspiring only to be a filmmaker. He applied to the University of Southern California's film school but was turned down because of his mediocre grades. He then applied and enrolled at California State University, Long Beach, where he became a brother of Theta Chi fraternity. In 1968, Universal gave Spielberg the opportunity to write and direct a short film for theatrical release, the 26-minute 35 mm Amblin'. He recalls a formative encounter with one of his favorite filmmakers, John Ford, who said: "So they tell me you want to be a picture maker. You see those paintings around the office?" Spielberg said he did. John Ford pointed to a painting and asked, "Where's the horizon?" Spielberg said it was at the top. Ford asked him where it was in another painting. Spielberg said it was at the bottom.
Spielberg made his professional debut with "Eyes", a segment of Night Gallery (1969) scripted by Rod Serling and starring Joan Crawford. Initially, there was skepticism from Crawford and studio executives regarding Spielberg's inexperience. Despite Spielberg's efforts to implement advanced camerawork techniques, studio executives demanded a more straightforward approach. His initial contributions received mixed responses, leading Spielberg to briefly step back from studio work. Crawford, reflecting on her collaboration with Spielberg, recognized his potential, noting his unique intuitive inspiration. She expressed her appreciation for Spielberg's talent in a note to him and also communicated her approval to Serling. In the early 1970s, Spielberg unsuccessfully tried to raise financing for his own low-budget films. He co-wrote and directed teleplays for Marcus Welby, M.D., The Name of the Game, Columbo, Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law and The Psychiatrist. The Columbo episode he would direct would be the show's inaugural, non-pilot episode "Murder by the Book". Although unsatisfied with his work, Spielberg used the opportunity to experiment with his techniques and learn about filmmaking. Impressed, Universal signed Spielberg to do four television films.
The first was Duel (1971), adapted from Richard Matheson's short story of the same name, about a salesman (Dennis Weaver) being chased down a highway by a psychotic tanker truck driver. Executives decided to promote the film on television from its quality. Reviews were positive, and Universal asked Spielberg to shoot more scenes so that Duel could be released theatrically to international markets. "Deservedly so" writes David Thomson, "for it stands up as one of the medium's most compelling spirals of suspense. Spielberg made his official theatrical debut with The Sugarland Express (1974), based on a true story about a married couple on the run, desperate to regain custody of their baby from foster parents. The film starred Goldie Hawn and William Atherton and marked the first of many collaborations with the composer John Williams. Although the film was awarded Best Screenplay at the 1974 Cannes Film Festival, it was not a commercial success, which Spielberg blamed on Universal's inconsistent marketing. The film opened in four hundred theaters in the US to positive reviews; Pauline Kael wrote "Spielberg uses his gifts in a very free-and-easy, American way-for humor, and for a physical response to action. Producers Richard D. Zanuck and David Brown took a chance with Spielberg, giving him the opportunity to direct Jaws (1975), a thriller based on Peter Benchley's bestseller. In it, a great white shark attacks beachgoers at a summer resort town, prompting police chief Martin Brody (Roy Scheider) to hunt it down with the help of a marine biologist (Richard Dreyfuss) and a veteran shark hunter (Robert Shaw).
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Jaws was the first movie shot on open ocean, so shooting proved difficult, especially when the mechanical shark malfunctioned. The shooting schedule overran by a hundred days, and Universal threatened to cancel production. Against expectations, Jaws was a success, setting the domestic box-office record and making Spielberg a household name. It won Academy Awards for Best Film Editing (Verna Fields), Best Original Dramatic Score (John Williams) and Best Sound (Robert Hoyt, Roger Heman, Earl Madery and John Carter). Spielberg said the malfunctioning of the mechanical shark resulted in a better movie, as he had to find other ways to suggest the shark's presence. Like Coppola on The Godfather, Spielberg asserted his own role and deftly organized the elements into a roller coaster entertainment without sacrificing inner meanings. The suspense of the picture came from meticulous technique and good humor about its own surgical cutting. After declining an offer to make Jaws 2, Spielberg and Dreyfuss reunited to work on a film about UFOs, Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977). Spielberg used 65 mm film for the best picture quality, and a new live-action recording system so that the recordings could be duplicated later. He cast one of his favorite directors, François Truffaut, as the scientist Claude Lacombe and worked with special effects expert Douglas Trumbull. It marked the first of many collaborations between Spielberg and editor Michael Kahn. One of the rare films both written and directed by Spielberg, Close Encounters was very popular with filmgoers and won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography (Vilmos Zsigmond) and Best Sound Effects Editing (Frank Warner). Stanley Kauffmann wrote: "I saw Close Encounters at its first public showing in New York, and most of the audience stayed on and on to watch the credits crawl lengthily at the end. For one thing, under the credits the giant spaceship was returning to the stars. For another, they just didn't want to leave this picture. His next directorial work was 1941 (1979), an action-comedy written by Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale about Californians preparing for a Japanese invasion after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Spielberg was self-conscious about doing comedy as he had no prior experience in the genre. Universal and Columbia agreed to co-finance the film. Spielberg directed Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), with a screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan based on a story by George Lucas and Philip Kaufman. They considered it an homage to the serials of the 1930s and 1940s. It starred Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones and Karen Allen as Marion Ravenwood. Filmed in La Rochelle, Hawaii, Tunisia and Elstree Studios, England, the shoot was difficult but Spielberg said that it helped him hone his business acumen. The film was a box-office success and won Academy Awards for Best Art Direction (Norman …
Spielberg's journey underscores the importance of perseverance and passion over pedigree. Despite not attending his first-choice film school, he honed his craft through hands-on experience and unwavering dedication, ultimately becoming one of the most successful and influential filmmakers in history.
Spielberg's Return to Academia
Years after achieving fame and fortune, Spielberg felt compelled to complete his bachelor's degree. In 2001, after directing numerous critically acclaimed and commercially successful films, he re-enrolled at CSU Long Beach and completed the Film and Electronic Media course. Spielberg studied everything any other college student did and even had to write a term paper for Natural Science 492. In fact, his professor, Donald J. Riesh, was impressed with his work. Sadly, Spielberg didn't actually enter any classrooms, instead using an independent study program at home. This is understandable, given that Spielberg was likely quite busy. He also protected his celebrity and privacy by enrolling under a pseudonym. He did, however, buy a cap and gown and attend the graduation ceremony. "I wanted to accomplish this for many years as a thank-you to my parents for giving me the opportunity for an education and a career. The article did mention that Spielberg had to complete Film and Electronic Arts 309, the advanced film studies course, by submitting a completed feature. As it so happens, other films in Spielberg's filmography were also used to help him through his college crash course. In a 2016 retrospective, Time Magazine published a graduation speech Spielberg gave to Harvard. It pointed out that the filmmaker was allowed to use some of his hit movies as proof of his knowledge of other topics. It seems that CSU Long Beach even gave Spielberg a paleontology credit for making "Jurassic Park." This would make a real paleontologist snicker, of course, as a lot of the actual science in "Jurassic Park" is the stuff of sci-fi monster cinema. For example, near the very start of the film, a group of paleontologists are shown uncovering a perfect, whole dinosaur skeleton. Spielberg did, however, closely study the biology of ostriches and elephants when he designed his movie dinosaurs and got to know the way animals behave, so he did, at the very least, do some legitimate biological research. The Los Angeles Times article also pointed out that Spielberg was able to use his study of the cosmos while making 1982's "E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial" as proof that he had looked into astronomy.
Spielberg's return to academia, despite his already established career, highlights the value he placed on education and personal growth.
Key Takeaways
The stories of Greg Forbes Siegman and Steven Spielberg offer valuable lessons for students facing college rejections:
- Rejection is not a reflection of your potential: A rejection letter does not define your capabilities or future success.
- Passion and perseverance are key: Success is often the result of hard work, dedication, and a relentless pursuit of your goals.
- Find your own path: Don't be afraid to forge your own unique path, even if it deviates from traditional expectations.
- Embrace opportunities for growth: Seek out experiences that challenge you and help you develop your skills and knowledge.
- Focus on making a difference: True success lies in contributing to the world and making a positive impact on the lives of others.
The Film School Generation
The generation of young American filmmakers who broke out in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s are typically referred to, colloquially, as the Film School Generation. This was a group of mavericks and new creatives that included such directors as Martin Scorsese, Brian De Palma, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas. They were the first generation of filmmakers who entered into their craft after a great deal of formal training and study. Steven Spielberg is often listed alongside the biggies mentioned above, even though he wasn't a product of film school. Rather, Spielberg was obsessed with movies since he was a young child (an obsession he detailed in the semi-autobiographical film "The Fabelmans") and only ever wanted to make movies. At the same time, he knew that academic study was important, so he attended California State University at Long Beach. (He even joined a fraternity.) Partway into his first year of college, however, Spielberg made "Amblin'," one of his more famous short films. Universal was so impressed by the results that it signed Spielberg to a seven-picture deal right away. Education is important, kids. But we can all understand why Spielberg left college after being granted a seven-picture deal when he was only 21 years old. His third feature, "Jaws," came out in 1975 and went on to gross nearly half a billion dollars at the box office on a $9 million budget.
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