So a better test would be to ask all the Columbia students who graduated in '83 who majored in the same field as Obama, which IIRC was international relations (see below).
It is my observation that college students very often have a circle of friends that centers around people they met freshman year. So transfer students do tend to know fewer people.
No one, as far as I know claims to know Obama from Columbia.
This has been debunked so many times. There are multiple roommates who remember him, one of whom also transferred from Occidental and published his recollections in a Columbia alumni magazine. One of his fellow students in international relations became president of MTV. There is a professor who remembers him. These people all claim to remember him from Columbia. And of course Columbia itself claims that he went there.
I’ll be one of the first to accept your POV if pointed in the right direction. I can tell you that his description of his neighborhood, the 90s on the East Side is nothing like my memories of that area in the 80s. It was crawling with yuppies and high end bars, not druggies perps and skels. Also, it would not have been off campus housing for Columbia as it is about three miles and two busses or one bus and one subway ride from Columbia.Basically 24 blocks south and the width of Manhattan east of Columbia.Inever said he did not attend Columbia, but I am suspicious of the quality of his attendance. One prof remembers him, a man who became POTUS.That’s absurd, unless he was involved in a non traditonal program that focused on a specific type of learning. Like maybe one authored by William Ayers who was an academic in NYC at that time.