After much speculation, Malia Obama, the eldest daughter of President Barack Obama and first lady Michelle Obama, has announced her plans to attend Harvard University, but not until 2017.
The White House announced her plans Sunday, as well as her intention to take a “gap year” so that when she begins, her father will be out of office.
Malia is continuing her parents’ Ivy League tradition: Harvard is where both of her parents attended law school, and President Obama graduated from Columbia as an undergrad, while Michelle Obama attended Princeton.
Malia will join a long list of presidential children who have attended the Ivy League school, 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 New York Times reports that Malia visited Harvard and a handful of other Ivy League and liberal arts schools last March on the East Coast, but because she accompanied her father to California last month, many believed that Stanford was at the top of her list. Apparently Crimson won her heart.
In other Harvard news, the school unveiled a portrait of its first African-American graduate, Richard Theodore Greener, Class of 1870, on Thursday.
Read more at the New York Times.