North Carolina is envied nationwide for the vigor and vision of its community college system, whose 58 campuses are spread strategically across the state. Yet there's room for wide improvements, and a timely study by a credible policy nonprofit puts its finger on several areas where the state must fix its community colleges to meet needs in North Carolina's not-so-distant future.

According to the nonpartisan N.C. Center for Public Policy Research, North Carolina will soon find itself short of workers, and the community colleges will need to produce 19,000 additional graduates each year. Fail at that task, and the state's economy will suffer -- more than it has with the sharp loss in manufacturing jobs in the last decade.

Without more graduates in health-care fields, the state also is likely to have a hard time providing decent care to the wave of elderly people expected as the Baby Boom generation reaches retirement age and North Carolina continues to draw retirees from elsewhere.

The community colleges already are accustomed to providing not only post-secondary courses and high school equivalency, but to retooling quickly to train workers for specific jobs when a new industry comes to town or particular industries have a labor shortage. In the Triangle area, the community colleges helped make it possible for the computer and pharmaceutical industries to blossom, and they were pivotal in supplying the region with nurses and respiratory therapists when many of those positions went empty a decade or so ago.

As North Carolina moves farther beyond its tobacco-and-textile past, the community colleges will be key to preparing workers for the state's future in high technology, health care, biotech and banking. They won't be able to do a good enough job, the policy center says, unless the legislature improves salaries for faculty and provides the schools with up-to-date equipment. Those are basics, and they remain vulnerable links in the community college chain.

Just as importantly, legislators should spend relatively more on high-cost, high-demand programs -- technology and the sciences. That's just sensible. And since the colleges cater to adult learners with family and often full-time jobs and also to high school dropouts, they need to provide better student support services, the center reasonably says.

For teenagers, community colleges can be a vital bridge to four-year schools or to good-paying jobs. For adults, they are indispensible for job retraining. But they need to be strengthened along the lines outlined by the center, which prepared its report with the help of the then-president of Craven Community College, Scott Ralls -- who recently became president of the community colleges system. Speedy work to address the center's recommendations is just the kind of support the new guy needs.

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