TROY, New York (AP) --Simeon Cloutier could not afford university tuition to study computer forensics, so he is working his way through community college, learning the fast-evolving field in classes closely tailored to what employers need.

Community colleges, the highly adaptable but often-overlooked element of higher education, gained a big supporter this week when President Bush identified them as a key to the nation's prosperity in his State of the Union address.

Many two-year colleges are offering specialized courses in fast-changing areas of technology and business such as computer forensics, which can be used in detective work to restore erased hard drives or find the source of viruses and computer worms released by terrorists.

"The key is to train people for the work which actually exists," Bush said Wednesday at Owens Community College in Perrysburg Township, Ohio. "No better place to do that than in a community college."

Cloutier, who attends Hudson Valley Community College in upstate New York, agrees with Bush.

"We have meetings of businesses coming in and I had one-on-one time to talk with a manager or a boss," said Cloutier, 20, who wants to work in the computer network security field. "They told me: 'No, we don't want that' or 'Yes, we want this.' So I had a very clear description of what the industry is."

Bush's proposal for the nation's 1,173 community colleges comes as schools face cuts by state and local governments, such as in New York, where Gov. George Pataki has called for a 5 percent cut in community college operating aid.

Professor James Looby, head of Hudson Valley's computer science department, said Bush was right on target in his assessment. Community colleges have always retrained workers, but the emphasis now is on new, technology-based fields hungry for trained workers, he said.

"We rapidly develop curriculums," Looby said, "and information technology and computer sciences is emerging and developing as quick as anything I've ever seen in history."

Bush said he wants to provide $250 million to the nation's community colleges, so they can train workers for the industries that are creating the most new jobs. The grants would go to schools that team up with employers looking for skilled workers.

LaGuardia Community College, for example, works with Verizon and Western Union to train cable technicians, using a $1 million federal grant. The Community College of Allegheny County in Pennsylvania quickly devised training programs a couple of years ago for workers laid off by US Airways in Pittsburgh. The Dallas Community College District taught job- skill courses after layoffs a decade ago at Braniff airlines.

Community colleges "are much more flexible in the way they operate, so they pretty much have their ear to the ground," said Norma Kent of the American Association of Community Colleges.

Kent also said community colleges train the most workers in what may be the nation's biggest growth industry: homeland security. Most police, firefighters, nurses, emergency medical technicians and computer security technicians are trained at the schools -- often through employers.

"Those kinds of careers are very essential to our country right now and community colleges are right in the middle of it," she said.