RALEIGH, N.C. — The next president of North Carolina’s community college system said Thursday he will continue to focus energies on helping train the state’s work force to compete in a high-tech economy.

“I don’t think there’s going to be a more important time for the community college system than right now and in the next few years,” Dr. Scott Ralls told the State Board of Community Colleges after its members selected him unanimously as president. “I don’t like to make promises, but the one thing I will promise you is that I will give it everything I have because I love this state.”

The board chose Ralls, the president of Craven Community College for the past five years, in a vote that drew an unusual amount of attention following the system’s decision to admit undocumented immigrants at all of its campuses.

Ralls will be paid $275,000 annually and will start his new job April 1. He takes the place of Martin Lancaster, a former congressman and who announced last winter he would retire next year after taking the post in 1997.

The board met in closed session to speak individually with Ralls and two other finalists: Kennon Briggs, the system’s vice president for business and finance, and City College of San Francisco Chancellor Philip Day.

Ralls, only 43, already had worked in economic and work force development at the system office and at the Department of Commerce before going to Craven.

“In his background and our exchanges, it was just felt that his energy and his personal nature would contribute to the work” of the system, Herbert Watkins, chairman of the presidential search committee, said after the vote.

Ralls will take over the nation’s third largest community college system, with 58 campuses system serving more than 800,000 students. The system continues to face strong pressure to retrain workers laid off from traditional jobs in textiles, furniture and tobacco.

“We’re making a transition to a new economy,” Ralls told reporters. “There’s a number of different, new opportunities and we have great international challenges, but our system was created to deal with those challenges.”