For Woodlands resident David Olowokere, one of Nigeria's sons, having a
master's degree in engineering just wasn't enough for his people back
home. So he got a doctorate.
His wife, Shalewa Olowokere, a civil engineer, didn't stop at a bachelor's, either. She went for her master's.
The
same obsession with education runs in the Udeh household in Sugar Land.
Foluke Udeh and her husband, Nduka, both have master's degrees.
Anything less, she reckons, would have amounted to failure.
"If
you see an average Nigerian family, everybody has a college degree these
days," said Udeh, 32, a physical therapist at Memorial Hermann-Texas
Medical Center. "But a post-graduate degree, that's like pride for the
family."
Nigerian immigrants have the highest levels of education
in this city and the nation, surpassing whites and Asians, according to
Census data bolstered by an analysis of 13 annual Houston-area surveys
conducted by Rice University.
Although they make up a tiny
portion of the U.S. population, a whopping 17 percent of all Nigerians
in this country held master's degrees while 4 percent had a doctorate,
according to the 2006 American Community Survey conducted by the U.S.
Census Bureau. In addition, 37 percent had bachelor's degrees.
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