Are African Immigrants Really 'the Most Educated' in the US? It Depends How You Count

A claim that circulated widely online in the late 2010s held that African immigrants, not East Asians, were the most educated group arriving in the United States, a direct challenge to the “model minority” framing often applied to Asian American success. The comparison traces to Census Bureau data cited in a September 2018 Washington Post opinion piece by economist Noah Smith, responding to a New York Times column that credited Asian American achievement largely to Confucian cultural values. Smith’s rebuttal cited Census figures showing that more than 43 percent of African immigrants held a bachelor’s degree or higher, edging out immigrants from East Asia as a regional group, with Nigerian immigrants alone approaching two-thirds holding college degrees.

That regional framing, Africa as a whole against East Asia as a whole, tells a real but partial story. When Africa Check, a fact-checking organization, tested a related claim in March 2018 that Nigerians specifically were the single most educated immigrant nationality in the US, the answer came back more complicated. Using 2016 American Community Survey data on foreign-born adults 25 and older, Nigeria ranked eighth among the roughly 80 countries the Census Bureau tracks, at 59.5 percent holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, behind immigrants from India (77.8 percent), Taiwan (72.3 percent), Russia (65.5 percent), Bulgaria (63.6 percent), Egypt (63.2 percent), France (61.2 percent) and Australia (60 percent). Nigeria still finished well ahead of most other individual countries, and Egypt’s presence in that top group is itself a reminder that “African” and “East Asian” are broad, internally varied categories rather than clean statistical blocs.

Within Africa’s own immigrant population, the gap between countries is just as wide as the gap between continents. A separate Census Bureau study of the five largest sub-Saharan African and Caribbean ancestry groups in the US, released in December 2017, found Nigerians led that group by a wide margin, with 61.4 percent holding a bachelor’s degree or higher, more than double the roughly 29 percent rate for the US population overall, compared with 27 percent for Ethiopians, 25.7 percent for Trinidadians and Tobagonians, 24.8 percent for Jamaicans and 19.2 percent for Haitians. Census demographer Stella Ogunwole, a co-author of that study, told Africa Check the Nigerian figure was one of the report’s most notable findings precisely because it stood so far above the other groups surveyed, Africans and Caribbean immigrants alike.

What holds up, then, is narrower than the sweeping version of the claim: African immigrants as a bloc do post higher average bachelor’s-degree rates than the US-born population and, by some regional comparisons, than East Asian immigrants as a bloc, and Nigerian immigrants specifically post some of the highest rates of any nationality in the country. What doesn’t hold up is the idea that any single African country, Nigeria included, outranks every other immigrant-sending country individually. Both things were true at once in the data cited around 2016 to 2018, which is exactly why the original claim needed the qualifier “by many measures” rather than an unqualified “the most.”