The sad part is, she has plenty of real-world examples around her. Her part time job singing is also staffed with people who got their grad degree, who barely get by on a few part time private teaching jobs and the few part time singing jobs. She watches them struggle to even pay their loans, but the story keeps being told "But it may be that they're just not as good as you."

Part of it, I suspect, is that especially in music, they start training and teaching kids when they're very young. This is all they know by the time they leave their undergrad studies, and accepting the idea that the path they've been on their entire life may not be viable sounds a lot like "giving up before the race is over." Rational arguments be damned.