Christopher Mahr, a junior at Keystone Oaks High School, stood watching as the machine on the tabletop in front of him made a quiet but intense buzzing noise.

"It's a mini-laser," he said, capable of engraving wood, plastic, metal, "almost anything."

As Christopher spoke, the machine was busy creating plastic nameplates for classrooms in Parkway West Career & Technology Center in North Fayette, following the layout he had created two days before on a computer.

"This machine will do it in about one and a half hours," he said. "It's a pretty interesting machine."

It's also a pretty good metaphor for the vo-tech school of today.

Just as they did a generation ago, the schools focus on teaching high school students to make things, build things and fix things -- from good haircuts to good plumbing to well-prepared meals -- things people often can't get online.

"If your furnace goes out at two o'clock in the morning on a cold January night, someone in India can't fix it," said Darby Copeland, assistant director of Parkway West during an open house last Thursday. "If the stone wall in your back yard falls down, you're not likely to get somebody from India to fix that, either."

But unlike a generation ago, nameplates are made with lasers. Computers in auto repair shops communicate with computers in cars. Typewriters are artifacts; most office procedures are computerized. Even masonry has been impacted by technology, with different techniques used for today's wide variety of decorative block and stone.

"The things that were done 15 or 20 years ago by a typewriter or carbon paper are now computer-generated," Mr. Copeland said. "A lot of tools have been replaced by computers."

Even in an arena as hands-on as auto body work, "mixing paint is an artwork unto itself," he said.

In a way, then, change at Parkway West has been evolutionary rather than revolutionary. Technology hasn't really changed what students learn to do there, but it has changed almost everything in terms of how they do it.

Mr. Copeland hopes that the evolutionary process will draw more students to the school, which serves 12 school districts, including Quaker Valley School District.

"Our culture we live in, everybody wants their children to do better than they did, and to a lot of people that means their son or daughter should go to college to be a doctor or lawyer," he said. "However, when we have kids a year or two out of high school making $50,000 or $60,000 a year at 20 years old, they're doing pretty well."

By contrast, he said, he sees a lot of recent college graduates who can't get work in their fields and are burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in college debt.

In fairness, statistics continue to show that college graduates make more than high school graduates. And $50,000 salaries are only realistic in a few of the most desirable fields; most students will make much less.

But statistics also show that only about half of the people who start college end up graduating, and that only two graduates out of three find work in their chosen fields.

Welders, meanwhile, are in huge demand, according to Jim Strunk, of Chicago Bridge & Iron. "Go down to the Gulf Coast and you can name your price," he said.

Mr. Strunk is serving as an adviser as Parkway West prepares to relaunch its welding program next year. The old welding room at the school, which is now unused, will be gutted and refurbished to accommodae modern techniques.

Mr. Strunk said technology has had an impact on welding, as it has everything else. New semi-automatic welders run a wire along the bead so that the welder can simply follow the wire, he said.

Mr. Copeland believes that many students would be better off choosing such training instead of failing at college.

"We fight this image problem that career technology is good for everybody's kid but mine," he said.

It's also worth noting that vo-tech students can and do go on to college, at rates nearly equal to academic students. Zachary Buggey, a sophomore from Montour who is in the digital multimedia technology program, said he wants to study computers in college and hopes to earn a master's degree.

Zachary said he has "always liked computers" and has gained from the program "the knowledge of what I want to do with my life."

South Fayette senior T.J. Marriott has that kind of knowledge, too. He's been a firefighter since he was 14, following in the footsteps of his father and brother, and hopes to be an emegency medical technician and, eventually, a paid firefighter.

"I think I'm going to have to move away, probably go south" to find a firefighting job, he said. But it's all he wants to do.

Parkway's public safety technology course was a natural for him. He expects to come out of it qualified as a basic emergency medical technician as well as certification in a number of rescue disciplines. He anticipates working on an ambulance for a couple of years before seeking firefighting work.

Other students have more pragmatic reasons for choosing Parkway, such as Missy Lagambo, a junior at West Allegheny High School.

"I don't know that I'm going to do it for my whole life," Missy said of cosmetology. "It might just be sort of a side job."

"Everything's going up in the world, all the prices and stuff," said fellow cosmetology student Brandy Gould, a sophomore from Moon Area High School. "And I have to have a job. I have to do something, and I like it."