The tuition for HLS next year is $41,500. It's quite believable that the tuition has gone up by a factor of 3 in 20 years as this would match up with other colleges. Obama's loans IIRC for all three years were around $43000 so it looks like he used loans for almost all the tuition cost. He didn't need a rich Saudi benefactor.
2)Everyone got honors at harvard back then. Like 80% of students did. They cut it back recently a few years back to a little under half i believe. Obama could’ve sent an ape to harvard law in his stead and gotten honors back then.
I don't think this is true. My impression is that honors, like grade inflation, have been going up. At Harvard College, all Latin honors are limited to 50% of the class. But the high honors such as magna cum laude (which Obama received) and summa are limited to a total of 20% of the class. No matter what the trend in Latin honors, they definitely weren't giving out a high percentage of magna's at any time in the past.
1) That is tuition. Combined with living expenses, it reaches over 60k a year so about 180k total. My bad.
2) I don’t know how magna was aportioned before. Law School scores are not subjective by any means. The faculty at harvard is mostly extremely liberal now and every conservative knows you have to bend over backwards even by legal standards to justify Roe v. wade. From the only article that has come out of Obama from his law school years, he toed the liberal line in not giving fetuses legal rights.