Asians have the highest rates of college graduates amongst all populations in the USA. Not surprising many Asian countries rank higher than the US in this area.
I believe their rates of college graduates are so high (almost 20% higher than whites) because this population is largely comprised of people from more educated countries, many of whom came to the USA on a student Visa. They continue to do so. Even with a shitty primary/secondary school system the US still draws intelligent people from other countries (Indians, lumped with Asians broadly but when stratified have a fucking ridiculous rate of college grads....76% vs 53% for the broadly defined Asians). You have a large population of educated people coming here, many on student visas or for education, gaining employment and becoming residents.
http://www.oecd.org/unitedstates/CN - United States.pdf
In that link is a report on education in the US with comparisons across the world. One of the charts show odds ratio of attaining higher education based solely on one's parent's attainment.
1 parent with a tertiary level of education confers an OR of 1.9 for their kids to obtain higher education across all the countries they look at, which is more than the listed. 1 parent with upper secondary education is slightly above 1. Neither parent with at least upper secondary education brings an odds ratio of 0.3 and the average across the countries is 0.44
The average makes it clear that no parents with higher education substantially reduces the odds of obtaining higher education. With over 50% of the Asian population being college graduates, Asian kids are far more likely to go on.
Even without any potential focus on school within the Asian community, odds for future generations to go to higher education would be greater than any other race. It's not just about "pushing education", it's about having a certain hand dealt that gives you either a 1/3rd or 2X multiplier in terms of likelihood to go onto higher education.
Beyond that, there's also a wage disparity at each level of education. When stratified by education attainment level, asians are the only minority who's earnings are on par with whites so the idea of just pushing academics doesn't explain why blacks and Hispanics with professional level educations are paid less than their white and Asian counterparts. Simply pushing education doesn't all of a sudden improve a kids odds if his parents are uneducated and it still doesn't address other barriers that are waiting for those who actually attain higher education.
I don't think it's reasonable to expect any population to dramatically change the product of multiple generations in a single generation. Whites could try as much as they want and not catch the Asian population in percentage of college graduates in a single generation because the foundation of college degree holders doesn't exist. It's just not possible to do.