WASHINGTON, Feb. 27 (Xinhuanet) -- Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates has urged American governors and leaders in the education community to restructure the country's high schools to raise graduation rates, prepare students for college and train a workforce facing growing global competition, news reports said Sunday.

    "Our schools were designed 50 years ago to meet the needs of another age," Gates said Saturday at a two-day National Education Summit, cosponsored by the National Governors Association and Achieve Inc., a partnership created by the governors and the business community aimed at increasing standards and accountability in education.

    "Until we design them to meet the needs of this century, we will keep them limiting, even ruining, the lives of millions of Americans every year," he said.

    High schools, he said, leave most students unprepared for college and for today's jobs. "When I compare our high school withwhat I see abroad," he added, "I am terrified for our work force of tomorrow."

    To address the problem, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation said it would give 15 million US dollars to the National GovernorsAssociation, to be disbursed to states that take significant stepsto improve their high schools. The Gates foundation said it had invested 733 million dollars in more than 1,500 high schools - about 8 percent of all public high schools - in the past five years.

    Three out of 10 students who enter high school in the United States do not graduate, four out of 10 who do graduate lack the skills and knowledge to go on to college or to succeed in the workforce, according to Virginia Governor Mark Warner, chairman of theassociation. "The economic ramifications of that could be devastating to our country," he said.

    The United States ranks 16th among 20 developed countries in the percentage of students who complete high schools and 14th among the top 20 20 in college graduation rates, and has slipped from first to fifth internationally in the percentage of young people who hold a college degree, according to Gates and other speakers at the meeting. Enditem