A prominent for-profit college recently announced that it has launched an online bachelor's degree program in applied linguistics.

School officials claimed that the institution is one of the first to offer this type of degree over the Internet. The executive dean of the university's college of liberal arts said that the online classes will focus on the use of linguistics in solving societal needs, such as language learning, processing for computer programming and speech pathology.

Regarding the computer portion of the online degree courses, the school official referenced the recent appearance of computer named WATSON on the game show Jeopardy. She said that the machine's effectiveness in answering questions so quickly and accurately was because of its natural language processing, which is one of the focuses of the new bachelor's program.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the number of employment opportunities for speech and language pathologists will likely grow by 19 percent over the next eight years, which is faster than the average rate for other U.S. occupations.