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.
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 what she would spend her gap year doing.
Malia Obama will be one of the most famous members of her class -- and a standout for the Secret Service agents who will protect her.
She was 10 when her father took office. Now a senior at the Sidwell Friends School in northwest Washington, she has come of age with the world watching. Her sister, Sasha, 14, is finishing her freshman year at the private school.
Although Malia Obama's grades and standardized test scores remain secret, factors in her favor when applying to colleges included her family background and study at top-flight schools.
Her parents, both Harvard Law grads, have four Ivy League degrees between them. Michelle Obama graduated from Harvard Law in 1988, and her husband followed in 1991. He completed undergraduate studies at Columbia University in 1983. She graduated from Princeton in 1985.
The president, speaking at a Des Moines 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 name-brand, famous, fancy school doesn't mean that you're not going to get a great education there."
Malia Obama is said to be an aspiring filmmaker. She plays tennis for fun.
In 2014, she visited two two rival schools in Northern California -- Stanford University and the University of California, Berkeley -- and later shifted attention to schools on the East Coast.
She visted six of the eight Ivy League schools: Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale. She also visited New York University, Tufts University, Barnard College and Wesleyan University.
Born in Chicago on July 4, 1998, Malia Obama attended the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools before she and her family moved to the White House in 2009.
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 Bush graduated from Yale and Jenna Bush from\, the University of Texas at Austin.
During Bill Clinton's presidency, his daughter, Chelsea, went from Sidwell Friends, a Quaker-affiliated prep school, to Stanford, choosing the place where her friend (andfuture husband) Marc Mezvinsky already attended.
Chelsea Clinton graduated from Stanford in 2001 and later obtained a master's degrees and doctorate from Oxford University in England and a master's degree from Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health.
Malia Obama interned last summer in New York City on the Brooklyn set of HBO's "Girls," the comedy-drama created by and starring Lena Dunham.
She was in California in 2014 as a production assistant on "Extant," a since-canceled CBS science fiction series.
She also completed several internships closer to home at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington, her mother has said.
One region of the country she seems to have skipped on her far-flung college tour: her native Midwest.
The president and first lady have said they will not return to Chicago, where they have a home, but will remain in Washington after his term ends in January. That would allow younger daughter Sasha to finish studies at Sidwell in the spring of 2019.
"We've got to find a place to live because we can't live here," Michelle Obama told a group of children at the White House last month. "They're kicking us out!"
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