North Carolina will need more skilled workers in the next decade than its universities and colleges are expected to produce, according to representatives from the University of North Carolina Tomorrow Commission.

The UNC Tomorrow Commission is responsible for looking at the role of the 16 universities in the UNC system in the future.

According to Anita Brown-Graham, the director of the Institute for Emerging Issues and a member of the UNC Tomorrow Commission, the responsibility of the commission is to ask questions, such as if the UNC system is preparing the right number of graduates for the jobs being created, and if the graduates the UNC system produces have the right skill sets for those jobs.

The Institute for Emerging Issues is a public policy organization at N.C. State. The institute tries to identify challenges and opportunities confronting the state and bring visibility and debate about them, according to Brown-Graham.

“The kinds of jobs that are being created require higher levels of skills,” she said. “When you look at North Carolina’s economic progress, it reflects a bipolar orientation. Jobs being created are going to be very high skill or very low skill with very little in between.”

Brown-Graham said this problem has been coming up for a while.

North Carolina’s changing demographics are going to strain the system, according to Brown-Graham.

She said if more students are graduating from high schools and looking to attend in-state colleges and universities, the system has to find a way to accommodate the increasing number of students.

Michael Walden, a distinguished professor of agricultural and resource economics, works with a group of professors from other UNC-system campuses to advise the UNC Tomorrow Commission.

“Our economy is becoming more technologically-oriented,” he said. “We have factories that are filled with high-tech machines and computers and offices that are the same way.”

American workers need to be trained to “use the best and most advanced technology” in order to be able to compete with foreign workers, according to Walden.

“We’re going to need many more people in health care, from nurses to health care technicians, to doctors and physicians,” he said. “A second area [of high demand] will be people trained in the professions such as engineering, architecture and computer science, as well as people working with and developing new technology. We’ll also need people in financial management and business management in general.”

Over the next four weeks, representatives from the commission will visit cities such as Greenville, Rocky Mount, Wilmington and Fayetteville. They will travel the state to find out what local people perceive their needs to be as far as economics and the workforce are concerned, according to Walden.

With the information the commission collects, it will design a set of proposals and plans for how the 16 UNC campuses should respond to the projected workforce and economic trends of the state, according to Walden.

Krystle Owen, a freshman in animal science, said she thinks the job market in North Carolina is pretty good.

“There are a lot of opportunities in different places and areas, especially around big cities because they are growing more and more every day,” she said.

However, Owen said she is still concerned that finding a job after graduation may be difficult.

Renee Marchin, a research specialist in plant biology, said she is not surprised about the high demand.

“For this area, there are the three research universities and the Research Triangle [Park]. And on the coastal plain, I think they have a growing agricultural industry, the big farmers,” she said.

Marchin said she does not think it is likely that North Carolina will be left with a shortage of workers, but that if the state does face that problem, it will have to, “entice people from surrounding areas to come [to North Carolina] to avoid any problems that could occur.”

Carson Koury, a first year transfer to the Agricultural Institute, said that the growing job market in North Carolina does not surprise him.

Koury said he thinks that a shortage of skilled workers could lead to more expensive health care.

“It goes back to supply and demand,” he said. “The services may not be as good. Doctors may spend less time with you because they have more people to deal with.”