Foreign-Born Blacks in the United States Are a Highly Educated Group

About 17.6 percent of all black adults over the age of 25 in the United States hold at least a four-year college degree. For whites, the figure stands at a much higher rate of 30.6 percent.

But some groups of the black population in the United States do much better. Of the 21.2 million black adults in the United States over the age of 25, there are 2,406,000 blacks who were born in foreign countries. The figure means that foreign-born blacks — mostly from Africa or Caribbean nations — make up about 11 percent of the black population of this country. These foreign-born black adults are far more likely to have a college education than are native-born African Americans.

Overall, 22.6 percent of foreign-born black adults have at least a four-year college degree. If we break the figures down by gender, we find that 26 percent of foreign-born black men are college educated. This is very close to the educational attainment figures for native-born white men in this country. About 19 percent of foreign-born black women in the United States have a four-year college degree.

Copyright © 2007. The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education. All rights reserved.