Other than for diploma mills, admissions standards are tougher for foreigners, and racial quotas don't apply, so black foreigners are far worse off than even domestic whites. Domestic black applicants of Obama's caliber (not very high for whites, but top 1% for blacks) get full rides to Ivy League schools. Michelle Obama got a full ride to Princeton, and one of her senior essays there (floating around on the internet) indicate she was basically illiterate. Obama had no reason to pretend to be a foreigner to get financial aid - his intellect compared to Michelle's is like Einstein compared to a borderline moron.
Aside from Obama’s hidden background, actions and motives and whether he described himself as a foreign student, it’s been my observation and experience for more than 30 years that colleges go out of their way to recruit students from African and other “underrepresented” nations. In decades earlier than that, the foreign students did have to be good students. Starting in the the 1970s, the students didn’t have to be any more stellar than native born African Americans. It was the color of their skin that was paramount. They got and still get scholarships if they’re accepted. Affirmative Action was underway by the early 1980s, on top of everything else. (I know of a white student, born in South Africa, but raised in the U.S., who got into top schools upon checking “African-American” of his application. He was in fact “African-American”! The school would not throw him out once he got there.)
For example, the University of Michigan states that it cares about the numbers and where they come from and boasts that it has students from over 50 foreign countries. It would not have been accidental that the private Occidental College would have more than receptive to an African student. Even his coming from Hawaii gives him an advantage, as does his claiming himself “African-American.” It’s common knowledge that schools go after a student from Montana or Hawaii, etc and that the standards for admissions for such as less. Bragging about international and domestic geographic diversity was a well established public relations topic before the 1980s. It is believed to have made the domestic students more cosmopolitan, more worldly. Later the main push was the claim that it was “more fair and just” to give precious spots to foreigners than to better qualified domestic white students. Two links:
http://chronicle.com/article/US-Colleges-Seek-Greater/129098/