Myth one: engineering or medicine, or nothing
Count what PUC Science actually opens on this site: agriculture and its officer posts, pharmacy, veterinary science, pure sciences into research, allied health, nursing, physiotherapy, architecture, defence, the merchant navy. The two famous professions are two doors in a corridor of fifteen.
The myth survives because those two doors have the loudest advertising. Nobody runs hoardings for agricultural officers — the state simply recruits them, year after year, from a smaller queue.
Myth two: arts is where weak students go
The stream with the lowest cut-offs produces the officers who run the districts. The civil services, the judiciary's feeder — law, journalism, psychology, economics, design: the arts corridor's doors are demanding, public and well-paid at their upper reaches, and not one of them asks for physics.
What is true: arts demands self-direction, because its roads are less signposted than NEET's single gate. A drifting arts student drifts further than a drifting science student. The stream is not the risk; the drifting is. That is an argument for maps, not against arts.
Myth three: a degree is a job
A generation ago a bachelor's degree was scarce, so it was a ticket. Today it is a baseline, and the market prices what sits on top of it: the specific skill, the internship, the portfolio, the second qualification. This is why every pathway page here carries a "study further" and a specialisation limb — the degree is the trunk, not the fruit.
The corollary families dislike: an ordinary degree from an ordinary college, chosen without a plan for what sits on top, is the most expensive way to stand in the general queue.
Myth four: government jobs are a closed shop
Competitive is not closed. Recruitment runs on published notifications, public syllabi and written exams — the KPSC, staff selection, banking boards, railways, defence, the state departments. Hard to win, yes. Rigged against the ordinary student from an ordinary town — the results every year say otherwise, and those towns supply a disproportionate share of the winners.
Every pathway on this site lists its government route beside the private one, because for many families that steady door is the one worth planning for — and planning is exactly what the published syllabus permits.
Myth five and six: the shortcuts and the ceilings
Myth five — "coaching is compulsory": coaching is an accelerant, not a licence. Board toppers and exam qualifiers emerge every year from self-study and free materials; what is compulsory is the hours, wherever they happen. Paying for coaching the family cannot afford, out of fear alone, is the myth's real damage.
Myth six — "it is too late to change roads": the system is full of maintained bridges — lateral entry from diploma to degree, open schooling back into eligibility, postgraduate switches, exams with generous age windows. Roads close one by one, not all at once, and later than the dinner table believes. The map's whole purpose is to show which ones are still open from where you stand.