PHILADELPHIA — Matt Love was a puzzle no one knew how to solve.

He had been traumatized by his father’s drowning a week before his fourth birthday. By second grade, he was bored and acting out, so unruly that the private school he attended asked him to leave halfway through the year. Told her son would probably never amount to much, Joyce Love home-schooled him, waiting until eighth grade to send him back to the classroom, this time at a public middle school in Gloucester Township.

It didn’t go well.

The socially awkward boy was bullied. And while his mother pleaded with administrators to challenge him academically with honors courses, they instead placed him among low achievers, many with behavioral problems.

Failing at school “destroyed my self-esteem,” said Love, now 18, a shy teen with braces who lives with his mother and younger brother, Tyler, in a neat Cape Cod in Blackwood with a wishing well out front.

College seemed out of the question, so his eighth-grade guidance counselor suggested a familiar track for kids without academic aspirations: vocational school. At Camden County Technical Schools, he and his mother decided he would learn HVAC repair, prepping for a career working on heating and air-conditioning ducts. It was a fateful decision, but not in a way anyone could have imagined.

Unbeknownst to the Loves, the school had joined an under-the-radar movement in vo-tech education that readies students for more than traditional blue-collar jobs. Through new programs in engineering, computer technology, and health care, teens who once seemed to have carpentry and clogged kitchen sinks in their futures are aiming for the ivied aeries of academia. And they are arriving there, primed to do well. This past school year, for instance, CCTS students opened acceptance letters from such higher-ed bastions as Columbia University, Brown University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Pennsylvania, Carnegie-Mellon University, New York University, and the Honors College of Rutgers.

Nationwide, the portion of vo-tech graduates who continue their education has risen steadily over the last generation to more than 90 percent, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Studies have found that at least one in four earns a four-year degree or professional certificate.

Central Montco Technical High School’s allied health program has been around a pioneering 20 years, sending its students to Ivy League schools such as the University of Pennsylvania and producing a half-dozen medical doctors. “Our mantra is that this is not your father’s tech school,” said Walter Slauch, administrative director of the Plymouth Meeting school.

In a survey of Class of 2016 graduates from CCTS, 81 percent said they were attending two- or four-year colleges. “I don’t think it’s pure luck,” said admissions officer Suzanne Golt.

In 2010, the school launched three specialized academies at its Gloucester Township campus — information technology, pre-engineering, and medical arts — for students with high standardized test scores and good grades in honors and Advanced Placement courses. All but medical arts are now also offered at its second campus in Pennsauken. Annual enrollment at the academies has risen to 150, out of a total student body of 2,085.