Malia Obama Taking a Year Off Before Attending Harvard in 2017
She's set to graduate high school in June
Published May 1, 2016 at 8:15 AM | Updated at 11:59 AM PDT on Aug 22, 2017
Olivier Douliery-Pool/Getty Images
Malia Obama attends a state dinner at the White House March 10, 2016.
President Barack Obama's daughter Malia will take a year off after high school and attend Harvard University in 2017, the White House announced Sunday.
Malia is the eldest of the Obamas' two daughters. She's 17 and a senior at the exclusive Sidwell Friends School in the District of Columbia.
A Harvard spokeswoman confirmed the school has received Malia's acceptance, and said the school looks "forward to welcoming the entire freshman class to campus and seeing all they accomplish in the years ahead."
She's set to graduate high school in June, then celebrate her 18th birthday on the Fourth of July.
Obama recently said he turned down an invitation to speak at Malia's high school graduation because his emotions would get the best of him.
Malia visited at least a dozen public and private colleges during her search, mostly on the East Coast.
Among them are six of the eight Ivy League schools and a few with Obama family ties.
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The president is a 1983 graduate of Columbia. The first lady graduated from Princeton in 1985. Malia's cousin, Leslie Robinson, is a sophomore forward on Princeton's women's basketball team. The president and first lady earned their law degrees at Harvard.
Mrs. Obama has said Malia wants to be a filmmaker, and many thought she would enroll at NYU's respected Tisch School of the Arts, which counts directors Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee among its alumni.
Malia spent last summer in New York City interning on the set of HBO's "Girls," the raunchy comedy-drama starring Lena Dunham. She decamped to California in the summer of 2014 to work as a production assistant on "Extant," a CBS sci-fi drama featuring Halle Berry.
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