Malia Obama to Attend Harvard in 2017

 

 

 Malia Obama, the older daughter of President Obama, plans to attend Harvard University beginning in the fall of 2017, waiting until her father leaves office to begin her college career.

The President and Mrs. Obama announced on Sunday that their daughter Malia will attend Harvard University in the fall of 2017 as a member of the Class of 2021. In deferring her start date until 2017, the 17 year old Malia, will take a gap year before beginning school, a popular option for high school seniors who are seeking experiences outside the classroom before they begin pursuing a degree.

According to Gil Troy, a presidential historian at McGill University and the author of “The Age of Clinton: America in the 1990s.  who said “When you’re a presidential has-been, the rest of your life you’re famous, you’re a target, you’re in a security bubble, but it’s not the same,” The kids can get to at least some level of irrelevance that they absolutely cannot get when they’re still in the White House.”

Harvard accepted 5.2 percent of applicants this year, making this admissions cycle the most selective in its nearly four-century history.

When Malia  arrives at Harvard, she  will join a long list of presidential children who have attended, including John Quincy Adams and his son, John Adams II; Abraham Lincoln’s son Robert; the sons of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt; Caroline Kennedy, the daughter of John F. Kennedy; and George W. Bush, who went to business school there.

The university has also long been a popular destination for the children of foreign leaders.

Source: nytimes.com