One of the sillier Obama rumors going around questions whether Barack Obama ever graduated from Columbia. The primary arguments are that (1) supposedly no one remembers him, and (2) Obama's picture is not in the yearbook.

This rumor is easy to explain and debunk:

1. Contrary to some assertions, Obama was indeed remembered by both some Columbia students and some Columbia faculty. Transfer students, especially ones living off campus, are seldom as well known as people who bonded with their freshman classmates.

2. Some yearbooks do not have individual pictures of the graduating class; it is not known whether Columbia at the time had such a practice.

3. When he applied to Harvard Law School, Obama would have filled out a form directing Columbia to submit his transcript to the Law School Data Assembly Service. The LSDAS would have computed his combined undergraduate GPA from both Occidental and Columbia and sent it to law schools, including Harvard, along with his LSAT score, and an index combining his GPA and LSAT. Since Obama applied in 1987-88, when he was living in Chicago, long after he left Columbia in 1983, the transcript would have had to have shown that he graduated for Harvard to admit him.

4. Even if Obama had somehow claimed that he was still atending Columbia when he applied to Harvard in 1987-88, I'm certain that Harvard would have required of Obama what was required of me when I was admitted to the University of Chicago during my last year at Yale College: proof of graduation by the start of first-year law classes.

Thus, it makes no sense to imagine that Obama would have been admitted to Harvard Law School without graduating from Columbia. And it would have been impossible for him to claim falsely that he had graduated if he really hadn't, since Columbia would have submitted his transcript to the Law School Data Assembly Service, which would then have sent it on to Harvard before they considered his application for admission.