Luke Combs Reveals Why He 'Hated School' and Never Finished College: 'I Was Probably Failing Out'
Luke Combs is revealing why he has yet to earn his degree from Appalachian State University.
During his appearance on Sunday Today with Willie Geist, 44, the country star, 29, candidly explains his decision to drop out of school — which he admits he wasn’t very fond of to begin with. PEOPLE has the exclusive first look at the interview, which airs Sunday on NBC.
“You came pretty close to finishing school, like a semester away,” Geist begins. “21 hours, yeah,” Combs reveals — confirming that he was just a few courses shy of completing his matriculation.
“What was the calculation like, ‘At this moment, it’s time to go to Nashville if I want to do this for real?'” Geist asks.
“Well, I mean I hated school,” Combs admits. “That helped; I was also probably failing out. We can pull the records on that probably. I love getting the alumni letters in the mail ’cause somehow those have wound up at my place like, ‘Hey, old pal, you sure love it up here don’t you?’ Which I do actually,” he says with a laugh.
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“The fundraisers found your phone number all of a sudden?” Geist asks in jest.
“The fundraisers have figured out that I went there for sure,” Combs says. “But that was a thing I honestly struggled with [for] a long time ’cause I did want to graduate. I just don’t know honestly if I could have, you know? Maybe I’m dumb for saying this but, I don’t think I wasn’t smart enough to graduate, I just don’t think I was committed enough.”
For Combs, graduation was indeed his ultimate goal, but he didn’t have the motivation to move forward once he realized what he really wanted to do.
“There was nothing about it that made me want to be like, ‘Man, I just — I gotta get up and go to science class today,'” the star explains. “Nothing about me wanted to go to math or science, you know what I mean? I was just more concerned with drinking and playing rugby and singing.”
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“I was like ‘Man, this is all stuff that I want to do,'” he says. “Obviously you can’t drink for a living, so that was off the list and then I quickly realized I couldn’t play rugby for a living either and so there was really only one choice. That left one thing.”
Luckily for Combs, his career in country music has proven successful. In 2019, he was dubbed male vocalist of the year at the Country Music Association Awards. Similarly, he won new male vocalist of the year at the Academy of Country Music Awards, among other impressive accolades.
Catch the full interview this Sunday on Sunday Today with Willie Geist, airing at 8 a.m. ET on NBC.The full unedited version of the interview is also available on the Sunday Sitdown podcast.
