2 million minutes: how high school students in China, India and Indiana are spending their time.

TWO MILLION MINUTES that shape a lifetime--that's one way to describe the four years of high school. But could those minutes also be shaping the future of our economy?

That's the question that Bob Compton is raising as he travels the country to promote his latest project, a documentary called "Two Million Minutes" that highlights the lives of high school students in Indiana and compares them to similar students in India and China.

Compton, who spent much of the past 20 years investing in entrepreneurial companies in Indiana, is on a mission to raise awareness about the stark differences he sees between the focus and motivation of Indiana students and their counterparts in the world's two most populous countries.

After witnessing a growing number of technology jobs being outsourced to India, Compton set out to discover what he describes as an "economic tectonic shift" that is taking place in the world. In 2005, he traveled across India, keeping track of his experiences and observations in what would later become a book titled "Blogging through India." While there were many cultural differences in food, religion and business, it was education that made the biggest impact on Compton.

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"The seminal moment for me was in a first grade classroom in Bangalore when I asked 5- and 6-year-olds what they wanted to be and most of them said engineers or scientists," Compton explains. Back in the United States, he asked the same question and found a lot of children who aspired to be rock stars and professional athletes.

"The one word that was never mentioned was 'engineer' and that just shook me to the core," Compton says of the American students. "Here is a society that is four times larger than us and they are all marching in a direction of strong math and science skills, which I happen to believe are going to be the skills that will allow people in the 21st century to earn high wages."

So Compton decided his next mission would be to sound the alarm about the impending workforce crisis that is brewing in our schools and threatening future jobs.

CREATING INDIANA JOBS

Compton knows a thing or two about creating jobs. After graduating from Principia College in 1978, his dream was to be the president of IBM. He applied for a job with the computer company and was assigned to Indiana, where Compton learned about technology and finance by selling to the state's banking community.

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Compton left IBM and completed a Harvard MBA in 1984. After working for a small, high-tech firm, he returned to Indiana. However, instead of providing technology to financial companies, Compton began working to deliver investment dollars to new technology ventures. Prom 1988 until 1997, he served as general partner of CID Equity Partners, an Indianapolis venture capital firm.

Compton was the lead investor in more than 20 businesses, five of which went on to have successful public offerings. For example, an investment of $2.3 million helped Software Artistry in Indianapolis develop its helpdesk software and Compton served as chairman of the company that was acquired by IBM for $200 million in 1998.

Another of his early investments was in Warsaw, where he found a young orthopedic company and helped it grow into the Sofamor Danek Group, one of the world's largest suppliers of spinal medical devices with $400 million in sales and 1,500 employees. An initial investment of $2.5 million led to an IPO on NASDAQ and Compton served as president of the company when it was acquired by Medtronic in 1999 for $3.7 billion.

That endeavor took Compton and his family to Memphis, Tennessee, where Medtronic is headquartered. However, he has maintained strong ties and investments in Indianapolis. In addition to serving on numerous corporate boards, he is currently CEO of permission-based voice messaging company Vontoo and the chairman and lead investor in ExactTarget, the rapidly-growing e-mail company that recently announced its own IPO.

Compton has also served a trustee for the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology in Terre Haute, which for nine consecutive years has been at the top of U.S. News & World Report's survey of higher education for engineering institutions.

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COMPARING EDUCATION SYSTEMS

Understanding the importance of education to engineering and technology jobs, Compton began to research the different approaches to studying in the United States, India and China. What he found was that American high school students spent far less time on academics than their counterparts. A longer school year, Saturday classes and many hours spent studying outside the classroom provide advantages for China and India.

The film notes that of the 2,103,840 minutes in four years (including a leap year), Chinese students spend 583,200 minutes on school work, compared to 422,400 minutes for Indian students and just 302,400 for students in the United States.

When we screened the film in India, their first question was "do the Chinese students really study that much more than we do?" Compton says. "They view each other as competitors. They don't even view Americans as competitors. They see America as rich customers."

In addition to the amount of time spent on studying, Compton also found an intensity and dedication among Indian and Chinese students to excel at academics. With each country having a population of more than 1 billion and a world of new economic opportunities, Compton says students and their families view education as the best way to succeed and he expects it will pay large dividends as the developing economies create entrepreneurs.

"Historically if you took a risk and failed, you were literally starving on the streets, he says. "But now, with the economy growing at 9.5 or 10 percent, they have money in their pockets and in their banks and they are going out and starting companies."

To highlight the differences in high school educations, Compton and a film crew followed Brittany Brechbuhl and Neil Ahrendt during their senior year at Carmel High School. He then did the same with two upper middle class students in India and another two in China.

"My goal was to take American parents and students and political and government leaders and take them into something that most of them had never seen ... the inside of a school in India and China ... going into a classroom and into a home to see what kids do on Saturdays."

Brechbuhl and Ahrendt both did well in high school and are now attending Indiana University and Purdue University However, their high school lives illustrate the influence of sports, social activities and working a part-time job as being more important than study habits. At the same time, the film shows students in India and China who work in schools with far fewer resources, live with a much lower standard of living and put much more effort on academics.

"It looks like the American students' life is like, almost a dream ... very light syllabus and maybe only study when you want to," observes 17-year-old Apoorva Uppala of Bangalore, India.

Compton says the sheer size of the Indian and Chinese populations lead to fierce competition to get accepted by universities. He notes the number of students in China's gifted program exceeds the entire number of K-12 students in the United States. Meanwhile, the film points out that while 110 million Chinese students are studying English, only 50,000 American students are studying Chinese.

"American kids work hard and are under stress. But it?s not intellectual and academic stress," Compton says. "The Indians and Chinese treat academics the way we treat sports ... All the passion, energy, extra investment and parent involvement that we put into sports, they put into academics."

While some parents in the United States worry about 'stressing their kids' with homework, Compton says Indian parents asked him to explain the point of allowing physical injuries in football and cheerleading.

Compton recalls an Indian father who told him, "My priority is to make sure my girls are globally competitive and able to face anyone fearlessly."

"How many American parents think that way?" he asks. "Am I helping my children allocate their time in a way that will position them to be competitive in a global economy?"

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

"Capital and opportunity are going to flow to where the brains are," Compton predicts. "Look at China buying 10 percent of Morgan Stanley and India's Tata bidding for Jaguar and Range Rover from Ford," he says. "Ford bought it from the British as they collapsed and now Tata is buying it from Detroit as Detroit collapses. I think there's an interesting metaphor there. If we're lucky, we'll become the Britain of the 21st century and if we are unlucky we'll become the French."

Compton notes he is already seeing a shortage of skilled workers to fill openings right here in Indiana's growing technology sector where companies are starting to raid each other's workforce. And while Indiana attracts some of the top students from India and China who choose to study at the state's universities, Compton says current government policy often forces foreign graduates to take their skills outside the United States after they complete advanced degrees in engineering and technology.

FINDING SOLUTIONS