WASHINGTON -- Michelle Obama's message for high-school seniors fretting about their college prospects is simple.

Do your research. Visit college campuses. Sit in on classes. Talk to professors, graduates and students. In the end, picking a college "is a very individual decision."

The first lady could just as well have been talking to her older daughter, Malia, who is expected to head off to college next fall with the Class of 2020.

The 17-year-old is among U.S. high-school seniors who are taking standardized tests, completing college admission applications, filling out financial-aid forms and writing personal essays -- all on deadline.

Then they get to spend a few months waiting to find out whether they got into their dream school.

Malia has some advantages, though. What school would turn away a president's daughter?

She also doesn't have to worry about how to pay for her college education.

Malia has visited at least a dozen public and private schools, mostly on the East Coast.

Among them are six of the eight Ivies and a few with Obama family ties.

Dad is a 1983 graduate of Columbia. Mom 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.

The other stops on her college tour: the University of California, Berkeley; Stanford; New York University; the University of Pennsylvania; Barnard; Tufts; Brown; Yale and Wesleyan.

Michelle Obama has said Malia wants to be a filmmaker, and NYU has the respected Tisch School of the Arts, which counts directors Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee among its alumni.

Malia spent the past summer in New York City interning on the set of HBO's "Girls," the raunchy comedy-drama starring Lena Dunham. Last summer, she was in California to work as a production assistant on "Extant," a CBS sci-fi drama featuring Halle Berry.