In Taylor Swift’s 2022 NYU commencement speech, there is a detail that most people overlooked. She acknowledged that she had previously set the conclusion of her “Love Story” music video at her “fantasy imaginary college,” a made-up college campus. She was unable to live the dream, so she recorded it. More truth about her relationship with formal education can be found in that one confession than in any headline or press release.
Swift did not attend a university. That portion is fairly easy. What’s more intriguing is how she reached adulthood without it and what that journey looked like in person.
After her family moved from Pennsylvania to support her musical aspirations, she attended Hendersonville High School in Tennessee for her public education through the ninth and tenth grades. The conventional school schedule became unfeasible when her career began to take off, with radio tours, opening appearances for big country acts, and a record deal at the age of fifteen.
She moved to Aaron Academy, which provided a flexible homeschooling program to accommodate her work schedule. According to all accounts, she took it seriously, finishing both years’ coursework in a single twelve-month period and maintaining a 4.0 average throughout her junior and senior years. It’s not a simple task. A single school year is difficult for the majority of teenagers.
In 2008, while Fearless was getting ready for release, she graduated from high school. She told the Associated Press at the time that living a dream and pursuing her education at the same time was thrilling. In retrospect, it seems less like an optimistic teenager and more like someone who had surreptitiously realized that her classroom would be the music industry itself, a place with its own harsh curriculum.
It’s difficult to ignore the similarities between her career and educational paths. They were both nonlinear. Both entailed being rejected early on—at eleven, she visited every Nashville label and was turned down—and still creating something. The years spent homeschooling weren’t a shortcut; rather, they were a compression that required focus and discipline in a manner that most structured environments don’t.
In May 2022, Swift received the NYU honorary doctorate, which was met with the kind of cultural commotion that usually follows her everywhere. Genuine congratulations on the one hand, and bristling skepticism on the other, split the reactions almost instantly. It makes sense that those who had dedicated years to obtaining their own doctorates felt conflicted about it. Honorary degrees are found in an odd place. They are symbolic and meaningful at the same time, celebrating impact rather than process. When Swift stood at the podium and made light of the “cringe” that is inevitable throughout a lifetime, she appeared to be conscious of that tension.
However, it’s important to consider the results of her education. At the age of fourteen, she became the youngest person in Sony/ATV history to sign her first publishing contract. All of the songs on her debut album were co-written by her. Later, she battled for years to recover ownership of her master recordings, a legal and business education that could not have been replicated in a university course. She didn’t experience these things. She dealt with them, frequently with little guidance on how to do so.
Swift’s story gives the impression that formal education and real-world formation aren’t always the same path. Most people who study audience psychology, industry power dynamics, and contract negotiation in lecture halls probably don’t know as much as she does. Depending on what you believe education is for, that may or may not qualify as an education.
On airport floors, she completed her high school coursework. The remainder was constructed in public by her.
