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Today, over half of China's undergraduate degrees are in math, science technology and engineering, yet only 16 percent of America's undergraduates pursue these schools.

Each year India and China produce four million graduates compared with just over 250,000 in Britain.

We know that to compete for the jobs of the 21st century and thrive in a global economy, we need a growing, skilled and educated workforce, particularly in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math. Americans with bachelor's degrees have half the unemployment rate of those with a high school degree.

It is U.S. workers who lose out when employers cannot get the high-tech graduates they need to compete with foreign companies in the 21st century economy.

China cannot pull in the best and brightest from all over the world. It's an ethnically defined nation, the opposite of an immigrant nation. You don't see a lot of American engineers trying to be Chinese citizens.

Leaders in China and India realize that science and technology lead to success and wealth. But many countries in the West graduate students into the unemployment line by teaching skills that were necessary to live in 1950.

In American math classes, we teach a lot of concepts poorly over many years. In the Asian systems they teach you very few concepts very well over a few years.

You have students in America, in Britain, who do not want to be engineers. Perhaps it is the workload, I studied engineering, and I know what a grind it is.

In the 1940s, about 20% of people in the U.S. had graduated from high school, but less than 5% continued their education to get bachelors' degrees or higher.