Billy Corgan turned down full college scholarship to pursue music

The Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan turned down a full college scholarship to the University of Michigan to chase his dream of becoming a musician. The Grammy winner was an excellent student in high school and the Bullet With Butterfly Wings hitmaker admits he fell out with his parents when he rejected an all-expenses-paid education at a top school to pursue a career in entertainment.
He tells CNN.com, “I was recruited for the University of Michigan for political science. I was offered a full-ride scholarship out of high school, and I would have been the first person in my family to go to college, and I decided instead to go into music. My family tore their hair out because here I had an academic career waiting for me and the resources to do it, and I just wanted to be a musician.
“It bothered me in the sense that I thought my family would support me as an artist, but artists is (sic) not necessarily always something that families believe in, they tend to think first of a person’s survival as a material thing, not as a spiritual nourishment, and music is of course spiritual nourishment, but it doesn’t often pay the bills.”