After a host of colleges rejected him, Parkland massacre survivor David Hogg spent nearly a year away from school, spearheading a national campaign to stop classroom shootings.
And now the face of the youth movement against gun violence has parlayed his activism into admission to Harvard University.
“Thank you all for the well wishes, I’ll be attending Harvard in the fall with a planned major in Political Science,” Hogg tweeted Saturday morning.
The former student of Marjory Stoneman Douglas HS — where 17 students were shot and killed in February — had been turned down by UCLA, UC San Diego, UC Santa Barbara and UC Irvine, TMZ reported in March.
Fox News host Laura Ingraham had mocked him on Twitter, saying the 18-year-old was “whining” about the rejections.
Hogg hit back, calling for advertisers to boycott Ingraham’s show. She lost more than a dozen advertisers and was forced to apologize.
On Saturday, Hogg’s younger sister Laura, another prominent gun control advocate, tweeted her brother’s acceptance news and tagged Ingraham in the post.
“Care to report on this? @IngrahamAngle,” she wrote. The TV anchor didn’t respond.
Hogg’s road to the Ivy League begins with a gap year following his high school graduation this spring, when he focused on helping the March for Our Lives campaign, which promotes gun control and youth voter registration.
In a New York Magazine profile of Hogg as he traveled around the country this summer, his mother was quoted saying Harvard was a possibility for her son.
At the time, he said applying to schools again did not seem “appealing.”
There was also the question of how to pay for college: “Wherever I go, I want to go for free, because I don’t want to put that over my parents or myself,” Hogg told the mag.
His mother, Rebecca, said, “We could never afford Harvard. Never. … With any luck at all, he can get into Harvard and they can help us financially.”
It is unknown how Hogg will be paying for his education.
But the Ivy League school pulled out all the stops to court Hogg, according to New York. Hogg took a private tour of the school this past spring, when he and his family also attended a Harvard Gala at Fenway Park.
His mom said alumni there told her, “There is the potential that your son will be the leader of this country, and we want to make sure he goes to Harvard.”
Jaclyn Corin, another Parkland survivor, tweeted this week that she was also accepted into Harvard.