Malia Obama’s pick: Harvard University
President’s eldest child to take gap year before starting college
WASHINGTON — Malia Obama will take a gap year after graduating from high school and then attend Harvard University in the fall of 2017, the White House said Sunday, a decision that frees her from the scrutiny of arriving on campus while her father is still president.
Obama, 17, the older of the president’s two daughters, visited more than a dozen schools, including Stanford, Yale and Columbia, before making her decision. The White House did not say how she would spend her gap year, and an official familiar with the situation said she is still considering her options. A Harvard spokeswoman confirmed Obama had been admitted beginning in 2017.
Students who take a gap year after high school typically use the time to travel overseas, volunteer, work or explore special interests. It’s a well-regarded way to catch one’s breath before four or more years of university study and a detour that Harvard and other top universities encourage.
In Obama’s case, waiting to start college until her father is out of office could mean more privacy for her. The teenager will be one of the most famous members of her class — and a standout for the Secret Service agents who will be in tow, even after her father leaves office in January of 2017.
The older Obama daughter was 10 when her father took the highest office in the land. Now a senior at the elite Sidwell Friends School in northwest Washington, she has come of age with the world watching. Her sister, Sasha, 14, is wrapping up her freshman year at the private school.
Anita McBride, who was chief of staff for first lady Laura Bush, said Sunday she thought it was “terrific” for Obama to take a year off. Elite Washington schools such as Sidwell can be pressure cookers, so gap years give young people “an opportunity to do something a little bit different that still enhances their educational experience,” said McBride, executive-inresidence at the Center for Congressional and Presidential Studies at American University in Washington.
Choosing what to do after high school is a “big decision,” McBride said, lauding Obama for appearing to make a choice that is right for her by taking a gap year, a move that is “more common than it used to be.”
Obama’s grades and standardized test scores remain closely guarded secrets, but factors in her favor in gaining admission to Harvard included her family background, studying at top-flight schools and a unique upbringing that was bound to make for a remarkable college essay.
Her parents, both Harvard Law grads, have four Ivy League degrees between them. First lady Michelle Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1988, and her husband followed in 1991. He completed undergraduate studies at Columbia in 1983. She graduated from Princeton in 1985.
Several U.S. presidents attended Harvard, the private school in Cambridge, Mass., founded in 1636. George W. Bush got a Harvard MBA, and John F. Kennedy, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt, Rutherford B. Hayes, John Quincy Adams and John Adams all went there.
Harvard has not been a popular destination for presidential sons and daughters in recent years, though Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy, graduated from Radcliffe College, now part of Harvard. The last two presidential children in the White House, twins Barbara and Jenna Bush, were spared major media scrutiny as they chose their colleges. They already were enrolled by the time their father won the presidency in 2000, Barbara at Yale and Jenna at the University of Texas at Austin.
This year, the cost of attending Harvard without aid is $45,278 for tuition and $60,659 for tuition, room, board and fees combined, according to its website.
The president, speaking at a Des Moines, Iowa, high school last fall about college access and affordability, said he knew that finding the best school was a “tough process” because his daughter was “going through it right now.”
“You guys are juggling deadlines and applications and personal statements,” he told the audience.
He called his daughter a “hard worker” and said he advised her “not to stress too much about having to get into one particular college.”
He said there were a lot of good schools and “just because it’s not some namebrand, famous, fancy school doesn’t mean that you’re not going to get a great education there.”