When talking about his plan to give free community college to as many Americans as possible in Michigan on Wednesday — calling education “the secret sauce, the secret to America’s success” — President Obama announced that he does have some mixed feelings about higher education, as he is on the verge of having to send a kid off to college for the first time. “Just yesterday, Malia started her first day of senior year. You know, I was sitting in her room because I was going to see her off her first day of school. She puts her head on my shoulder and she says, ‘Daddy, you know, you realize this is probably going to be the last time that you ever send me off for my first day of school.’”
The audience began to “aww,” according to People. The 17-year-old has been getting ready to head off into the real world for a while, doing internships with HBO and CBS and touring Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Brown, Tufts, Stanford, Wesleyan, University of California Berkeley, NYU, and Columbia. “And I started — I had to look away. I didn’t want to just be such a crybaby. It makes no sense. Michelle and I are way too young to have daughters who are both almost in college now. So as a parent, I was a little freaked out,” America’s dad-in-chief said, pretending to wipe away a tear.
