High end restaurants tend to hire from these culinary institutions. You do learn a lot at culinary school - I did one year - and it is not easy. But even high end restaurants do not pay line chefs a great deal of money. You have to work yourself up in a very difficult industry.
You can tell she has little networking ability and little drive. They very fact that she made no connections with companies that might want to hire her in 5 years of school should tell you something.
Exactly! As is the case with most jobs/industries. You start out at the bottom & work your way up, gaining knowledge, expertise, and (generally the most important) connections along the way.
Even with all this, you generally don't truly become a big time success or wealthy working for somebody else.
And to make her situation worse, she elected to stay in the California coastal area where there is no shortage of ‘high end’ cooks.