Rob:  Regardless of nationality, as soon as a student completes the eighth grade, the clock starts ticking.  From that moment until high school graduation, a young person has roughly two million minutes to prepare for their life as an adult.  Today, we focus on how that time is being spent, and why a new film is raising serious questions about the global competiveness of America’s students.
Rob:  Meet Neil Ahrendt, senior class president.
Neil Ahrendt:  Occasionally I do homework, like over the weekend.  Let’s see, on Monday, I had to give a presentation in my macro economics class, and I started it on Sunday about 4:30.  So, I was on the computer working on that until about two in the morning.  
Brittany Brechbuhl:  Because I want to do pre-med, I know it’s going to be a lot of studying.  So, it’s not going to be as much fun.
Rob:  And aspiring doctor, Brittany Brechbuhl, two graduating seniors featured in a film that questions whether our educational system is as good as we think it is.
Brechbuhl:  I want to join a sorority, which obviously, you’re going to party a lot, you’re going to have some fun.
Tim Draper:  America is the one country in the world that doesn’t seem to recognize that it’s in competition for the great minds and the capital of the world.
Rob:  In the film, TWO MILLION MINUTES, filmmakers contrast America’s educational system with that of China, and India, two emerging economies that have made dramatic leaps in educating their middle class.
Vivek Wadhwa:  Americans aren’t globally aware.  They’re more worried about what’s happening in their community than they are in the world.  Americans don’t know they’re competing with Indians and Chinese.
Rob:  Two countries where the overwhelming majority of college students receive degrees in science and engineering.  And with wages substantially lower than those in the U S, multinational companies are increasingly choosing China and India for their high tech workforce.
Robert Reich:  The people who are potentially losing their competitive edge are Americans.
Rob:  Which is why filmmakers followed six students from three different countries as they prepared to enter a global economy. 
Good morning Hormel High School.  This is Hillary Hoover with your morning announcements.
Rob:  Across the u s, fewer than 40 percent of students take a science course more rigorous than general biology.   As for math, only 45 percent of American students take anything beyond two years of algebra, and one year of geometry. 
Britanny:  I’m just not the type of person that can study, for you know, 20 hours a day.  I like to kick back and have fun.
Rob:  But in China, studies are a little more regimented.  Students here average about 9 hours a day in school.  That’s often followed with one-on-one tutoring, leaving little time for an American past time, video games with friends.
Neil:  There is a chance that I’ll actually have to start putting more effort into schoolwork, because that’s what people have always told me, because I’ve always kind of excelled without putting forth a lot of effort.
Vivean Stewart:  The Chinese school year, at the secondary level, is a full month longer than the U S school year.  And if you look at the time spent in school during the day, that is also longer.  If you add to that the amount of time spent doing homework, and studying, by the end of high school, Chinese students have spent twice as many hours studying as American students.
Rob:  The average American student spends about 900 hours in the classroom, and about 1500 hours in front of the TV, with 66 percent of college bound seniors having no more than one hour of homework per night, and none on the weekends, but not so in the developing country of India.
I think American kids have a bigger challenge than Indian kids.  And the reason is that when you grow up with economic certainty, it takes a very different kind of motivational pull.  So, when you grow up like I did, where you know, my parents were both professionals; they were very smart, you know; yet, we had no money.  I mean, I had to buy second hand textbooks.  And now, for me, that economic opportunism is a simple beacon.  It makes me work hard.  It makes me apply myself.  So, I actually think kids in the United States have a bigger challenge of being able to get to this point, because they have to apply themselves and rev their internal engine in a different way.  And I’m not quite sure exactly how you get that uniformly like you do with economic opportunism.
Rob:  During the past decade, Indians have founded more engineering and technology companies, across the U S, than immigrants from Britain, China, Taiwan, and Japan, all combined.
Vivean Stewart:  The fact is that, Indian kids look up to the tech entrepreneurs in the USA.  And they’re the heroes, I mean.  I tell you, when I was, I run two technology companies.  When I used to go back as a tech executive, I was treated like a movie star in India, simply because I was a high tech executive who succeeded in the USA.
Rob:  Nearly 60 percent of engineering PHD degrees awarded annually are earned by foreign nationals.
The question is, can Americans continue to add substantial value to an integrated world economy so that the incomes of Americans continue to rise, and not just the incomes of the top 20 or 30 percent who get the best education?  But, I’m talking about the incomes of most Americans.  That’s the goal here.  It’s not to be number one, necessarily, in everything.  It’s not to knock the Chinese and the Indians down.  It’s to be part of an increasingly, hopefully, more valuable set of human minds doing more and more complicated and more productive things.