Malia Obama’s College Pick: Ivies, Liberal Arts or Public University?

By NICHOLAS FANDOS

WASHINGTON — President Obama recently had some fatherly counsel for his 17-year-old daughter, Malia, even as he acknowledged that she might not listen to him.

“One piece of advice that I’ve given her is not to stress too much about having to get into one particular college,” Mr. Obama told a group that included high school students in Des Moines last month. “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.”

His second piece of advice, the president said as the room broke into laughter, “is keep your grades up until you get in, and after that, make sure you pass.”

It is college application season in America, including at the White House, where Malia Obama, a senior at the elite Sidwell Friends School in Washington, is in the middle of the pressure-filled process of writing personal essays, asking for teacher recommendations and narrowing her choices.

Reports from college newspapers and conversations with campus tour guides indicate that Malia, perhaps the nation’s most eligible 2016 college applicant, is winnowing a list of Ivy League schools, liberal arts colleges and at least one top-ranked public university. Her current grades and SAT scores are not publicly known — the first lady’s office declined to comment for this article — but Mr. Obama, for one, told the students in Des Moines that his daughter was a “hard worker” and that he did not expect her to “start feeling a little slack” in her senior year.

(What is known is that in 2009, when Malia was all of 11, Mr. Obama announced to the world that she had gotten a 73 on a science test. “So she came home, and she was depressed,” the president said during a speech in Madison, Wis. But Malia, he said, studied hard and soon earned 95 on another test.)

So far, Malia has toured six of the eight Ivies — Brown, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale — as well as Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. She has also visited New York University, Tufts, Barnard and Wesleyan.

Not surprisingly, Mr. Obama and his large entourage have not tagged along. On some trips, even Michelle Obama has stayed behind, letting family friends show her daughter around. Students have still angled for selfies and Snapchats when they recognized Malia, but a low-key search process is most likely what the White House is aiming for, said Lisa Caputo, the press secretary to Hillary Rodham Clinton when the first lady’s daughter, Chelsea (Stanford ’01), was looking for colleges in the 1990s.

“You want to have as informed a visit as possible, just like anyone else who is a college applicant,” Ms. Caputo said. “You want to let them get a feel — what’s the vibe on campus — without being followed by a whole swarm of people.”

The colleges have happily cooperated. At Columbia, the president’s alma mater, Malia was shown around by Zila Reyes Acosta-Grimes, a third-year law school student serving in the University Senate, whose father is a prominent New York jurist. At Yale, the college’s head student tour guide, Jeremy Hutton — once a competitor in the Mr. Yale pageant — showed off the Gothic campus. At Harvard, Malia toured the Yard with Taylor Nides, a fellow senior from Sidwell; Ms. Nides is the daughter of Thomas R. Nides, a former deputy secretary of state under Mrs. Clinton, and Virginia Moseley, the deputy Washington bureau chief at CNN.

Malia and Taylor followed their tour with a lunch off campus with Olivia Moseley, a Harvard senior who is the niece of Ms. Moseley and Mr. Nides.

Many schools Malia has visited have a claim on her potential interests. Stanford, where Chelsea Clinton was an undergraduate while her parents finished their time in the White House, offers a chance to spend four years away from the East Coast under the radar. N.Y.U. boasts the best film program. Princeton, Mrs. Obama’s alma mater, continues to have close ties to her family. (The first lady’s niece, Leslie Robinson, plays on the Princeton women’s basketball team.)

And then there is Harvard, where her parents went to law school. There, Malia would be the latest in a long line of presidents’ children — multiple Roosevelts, many Adamses, a Kennedy, a Lincoln and a Bush (the business school).

Sidwell, like many top private schools, assigns each of its students a college admissions counselor and helps guide them through this series of hoops familiar to any college applicant. Strong extracurricular activities are important, and Malia has exotic ones.

This past summer, she had a brief internship in New York City on the HBO series “Girls,” and in the summer of 2014 she was a production assistant on CBS’s “Extant,” a series produced by Steven Spielberg and starring Halle Berry.

Add to that a cosmopolitan home life — Pope Francis and President Xi Jinping of China were recent guests — and you have a very competitive candidate.

“Without question, the places and people she has been exposed to would be fodder for a more curious mind and wider personal knowledge than her peers — and that can’t help but be apparent in her college entrance applications and interviews,” said Carl Sferrazza Anthony, a historian of presidential families at the National First Ladies’ Library.

At this point, few know Malia’s college preferences, or even if she is applying to all of the schools she has visited. But the paucity of information has done little to tamp down speculation. When Malia was spotted in August 2014 wearing a Stanford T-shirt on a bike ride in Martha’s Vineyard, bloggers declared the contest all but done. Others have pointed out that the summer internship in New York may have tipped Malia’s hand.

But as far as the president is concerned, what matters is what his older daughter makes of her education.

As he told the students in Des Moines, offering what he said was a third piece of advice to Malia: “Don’t go to college just to duplicate the same experience you had in high school. Don’t make your decision based on, well, where are all my friends going so that I can do the exact same things with the exact same friends that I did in high school. The whole point is for you to push yourself out of your comfort level, meet people you haven’t met before, take classes that you hadn’t thought of before.”

“Stretch yourself,” the president added. “Because this is the time to do it, when you’re young.”

歐巴馬勸長女 選大學別執著名校

現在是申請美國大學的季節，紐約時報報導，美國總統歐巴馬的十七歲長女瑪麗亞正為了要進哪間學校傷腦筋，她已低調參觀八所長春藤名校中的六所，不過歐巴馬建議她，不要執著於名校，但他承認女兒不一定會聽他的。

紐時查閱多份大學報，並詢問多所大學的導覽員，發現瑪麗亞已造訪六所長春藤名校：布朗、哥倫比亞、哈佛、普林斯頓、賓州與耶魯大學。另外兩所位於西岸的史丹福與柏克萊加州大學還沒參觀。她還造訪了紐約大學、麻州塔夫斯大學、紐約市私立女子文理學院「巴納德學院」與康乃狄克州私立文理學院「衛斯理大學」。

歐巴馬夫婦都沒有陪瑪麗亞參觀大學，只有第一家庭的朋友帶著她走訪各地。這些大學或學院的學生會在認出瑪麗亞時，驚喜地跟她合照。美國前第一夫人希拉蕊．柯林頓的女兒雀兒喜曾於1990年代尋找心目中的理想大學，希拉蕊當時的新聞秘書麗莎．卡普托說，白宮會希望瑪麗亞尋找的過程盡量低調，瑪麗亞才能獲得最多資訊。

瑪麗亞感興趣的學校對她各有好處。史丹福可讓她遠離東岸，避免成為鎂光燈焦點。紐約大學以電影課程聞名。哥倫比亞是歐巴馬的母校。普林斯頓是蜜雪兒的母校，與第一家庭關係密切。歐巴馬與蜜雪兒都從哈佛法學院畢業，哈佛也是美國多位前總統子女的母校。

歐巴馬近日在美國愛阿華州首府狄蒙對高中生演說時，透露自己對女兒念大學的建議，首先是「不要太過執著於名校」，不是名校的學府也有可能提供優質教育，其次是進大學前盡量維持高分，「進去以後求及格就好」，最後是不要以「能重複高中的生活」這理由來選大學，上大學就是要「跨出舒適地帶」，認識新朋友，接觸新思想，增廣見聞。

原文參照：
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/05/us/politics/malia-obamas-college-pick-ivies-liberal-arts-or-public-university.html

2015-10-06．聯合報．A13．國際．編譯李京倫