Barack Obama is a pretty smart guy

One of Donald Trump's biggest blunders was questioning President Obama's educational credentials, and I don't understand why he did it.

President Obama attended Occidental College in Los Angeles for two years. Long considered one of the leading liberal arts colleges in the country, Occidental has approximately 1900 students. In 2009, enrollment spiked to nearly 2,000. Occidental, or Oxy as it is called, was one of the first colleges in the West to have a Phi Beta Kappa chapter. The 25-75 SAT range is between 1200 and 1380, according to the U.S. News Guide.

Even if the SATs needed to get into Oxy in 1979, when the future president started college, were 100 points lower than they are today--not an unusual trend with all selective schools--it was still an extremely competitive school.

Trump made hay that Obama transferred to Columbia as the result of an affirmative action program. If so, the program must not have had many students.

Columbia College, the undergraduate division of Columbia University in New York, has approximately 4,200 students. The enrollment has not grown very much over the past thirty years though the college has also become co-educational. It admitted only men while sister school Barnard, still in operation, enrolled all of the women.

However, most of the 1,400 students who make up a freshman class at Columbia stay at Columbia, and there are few spots for transfer students. According to the university Web site:

We typically admit fewer than 10 percent of those who apply for transfer admission each year. Though the number varies from year to year, in recent years, we have admitted roughly 150 transfers from over 2,200 applicants.

That's not great odds for any applicant from anyplace. Barack Obama might have been given some consideration on the grounds of diversity, being from Hawaii and of mixed heritage. But he would have still needed excellent grades in high school as well as college. According to Columbia's site:

High school grades, rigor of program and standardized test scores are all important in the evaluation of transfer credentials, especially for students applying for sophomore standing.

I seriously doubt that Columbia's standards in 1981, when Obama transferred, were lower than they are today.

It's very funny that these critical comments about the president's education came from a man who also transferred to an Ivy League school. While The Donald proudly calls himself a Wharton graduate, he spent his first two years of college at Fordham in New York. I wonder what he would say if Fordham claimed him as an alumnus. Or if he'd sue.