Occidental, Columbia and Harvard all happen to be private educational institutions. In the 1970s and 1980s I’m not quite certain what kind of scholarship applications Obama was required to file (that is, private or public). I can recall vaguely that there was an umbrella financial aid application that one could fill out for all colleges. I’m not certain that this was official. If Obama filled one of these out incorrectly, then it seems as if it would be alleged fraud. The statute of limitations on fraud probably applies. In any case the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act of 1974 (FERPA) undoubtedly applies. Having written that, colleges can be fairly leaky with student information (I know because I once worked in the records office for a major university, and it was always a temptation to look up another student’s file, though I never did). This implies to me that Obama might have illicitly had his student files at the educational institutions he attended “cleaned up.”
I am distantly recalling an executive order that Obama passed once he got into office that was related to privacy. I wonder if some details of that EO would further act to decrease access to the information relevant to these types of questions.
Executive Order 13489 of January 21, 2009