One of the books that I read last year, I can’t remember which [1], said that the greatest contributor to wealth over the long run is education. My unfounded assumption that explains the reasoning of why you did not experience American families reacting the same way that yours did is: the American belief in rugged individualism. I think that most Americans would say that “hard work” is the biggest contributor to wealth [2]. Being an immigrant, I guess that your family, and probably society they are from, adhered to the former belief, and that is why they took your education so seriously?

[1] Could have come from: Can American Capitalism Survive?, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, maybe Enlightenment Now.

[2] It could very well be luck: https://arxiv.org/abs/1802.07068