So was being black and a foreign student his key to the cut rate costs at a first rate school?
I think the school he went to in California, Occidental?, was probably on a foreign scholarship (there is some controversy over his Indonesian citizenship and that he claimed such there).
He may even have gotten scholarship (hell, screw the scholarship part - he was never that smart - call it a “Black Grant”) at Columbia.
IIRC, Harvard is ridiculously expensive, beyond him, his whole family, anything they owned, could ever own, or even wish about having or owning IMO.
I’m thinking that Harvard was one of two things:
1) It was funded by forces unknown (think Manchurian Candidate), or
2) Harvard really did get snowed by his awesome blackness, influence from unknown sources and they gave him a full-boat ticket to an education where he didn’t have to do squat. If you think about Harvard has endowment funds worth tens of billions of dollars; it would have been nothing for them to float his nothing education.