Northern Virginia Community College near Washington has several campuses and 75,000 students. It offers a two year associate degree. Many of its students hope to turn computer skills into a new profession and a good salary. One of them is Marc McCarthy.

      “Fortunately in this industry, we are really blessed with a lot of openings,” McCarthy said. McCarthy is back in college after decades working in hotels and restaurants - an industry, he said, that offers few good opportunities in the future.

      Experts said many U.S. manufacturing, administrative, and middle management jobs have been eliminated by automation and foreign competition in recent years. These jobs were once a ticket to secure middle class salary. Cornell University Labor Economist Sharon Poczter said the job market has changed. “This growth in jobs has been either towards the low skill, low income jobs, or the higher skill, higher income jobs and that’s why we have seen this hollowing out of the middle class, of the factory jobs, of the office jobs," Poczter said.
專業人士分析許多本土製造業和行政管理等職務，因為自動化和國際競爭下而被淘汰。這些曾經穩固的中等俸祿隨著職場變動而不再風光，康乃爾大學勞動經濟學 Poczter 說。人才需求走向極端，低技能低薪資或者高技能高薪資，那些中產階級，例如工廠職員或辦公助理，人數只會越來越少。

      Educators tell students it's more important than ever to develop math, science and computer skills because technological change is accelerating, and the demand for highly-specialized skills is growing. School administrators are also trying to identify skills needed for emerging professions, and figure out ways to teach them.
教育家告訴學生們：科技突飛猛進下，我們必須加強數學、理工和電腦的知識，才能趕上社會對專業知識份子的需求。校務人員也試著找出新興產業的所需技能和如何施教。

      The president of Northern Virginia Community College, Robert Templin, said it's difficult for schools to hit this “moving target.” "Just in the last five years, new careers in fields like health information technology, cyber security, geospatial systems, these are fields [that] a decade ago didn't even exist. So trying to prepare someone for a job that is not yet there is pretty difficult," Templin said.
北維吉尼亞社區大學校長 Templin 說：找出潛在目標是件難事。近五年來，例如HIT(衛生信息技術)、資訊安全、空間系統等新職缺，十年前根本連聽都沒聽過。所以，要把一個人學到的能完全應用在工作上，是很難抓得準的。

      But Templin said it's worth the effort because it makes it more likely that graduates will find good jobs. Computer Science graduates, he said, can start at $60,000 a year.
但是 Templin 也說只要畢業生有比別人更多的機會找到好工作，再辛苦都值得，像現在資工系學生出校門後的起薪是一年6萬美金(相當於兩百萬新台幣)。

      Unemployment for U.S. college graduates is low, but a recent survey shows that four out of 10 recent graduates say they are under-employed, doing jobs, like in retail sales, that do not require the degrees they have earned. They are disappointed because these jobs do not bring the kinds of salaries they were hoping to earn.