The flying schools are commercial companies. They survive by making a profit. Their business is selling flying courses to those who for whatever reason want to buy those courses. Like all companies, they advertise and promote their product as being better than the competition, and a "must have" item. It is up to the buyer to decide if that product is ultimately right for them. It is also up to the buyer to do their own research prior to making their purchase.
You cannot blame the sellers for showing pretty pictures of happy young pilots resplendant in their neatly starched uniforms and sunshades standing alongside a freshly polished jet airliner, parked under a sunny cloudless sky.
Car manufacturers rarely sell their product with pictures of it stuck on the M25 at rush hour in the rain. Far better, pretty vistas of scenic open roads with "promises" of freedom and adventure. It is all about selling and tapping in to the customers desire.
These schools sell training for various pilots licences and ratings, and in most cases that is what they provide. The problem seems to be in the perception that some of their customers have once they have purchased and obtained these products. Certainly the sellers were happy to encourage that perception, but it is the buyer who should beware.
There is no doubt that for a career in aviation you must, at the most basic level, be in posession of the relevant licences. However that is not the end of it. The reality is that you then need a realistic and practical game plan. For the vast majority of people that will involve a great deal of additional cost obtaining further ratings, training, experience and recurrent training. Even then the opportunities that are likely to be available may well be very thin on the ground or almost non-existent. Historically this was often the case. People obtained the licences and worked their way up through a variety of aerial work such as instructing, air taxi flying, sightseeing flights, parachute dropping, banner towing, etc. After a few years of this the additional hours and experience often opened up doors to the airlines albeit at the commuter/turboprop level. A few years of this and that experience would translate into the sort of experience the Jet operators and major carriers were demanding. It was at this point that career climbers ( often called self improvers) joined with the stream of air force leavers, to compete for those first level vacancies. The system wasn't easy, and it certainly had a high attrition rate.
Over the last 10-15 years, coupled with the rapid expansion in air travel, and particularly the rapid expansion of low cost air travel, there has been a concerted effort to remove unnecessary expense. One of the biggest costs for any company is obviously labour, and particularly expensive skilled labour. It didn't take them long to realize that a lot of that cost was sitting in the pointy end of the aircraft they were leasing. In the preceding 10 years the manufacturers had responded to the airlines demands by designing the flight engineer out of the flightdeck, thereby reducing the operating costs. If you could then eliminate one of the pilots things would get cheaper and cheaper. Unfortunetaly that was really a no-go for the manufacturers and regulators, so other ideas had to be looked at. There had been a very limited supply of intensively trained commercial pilots by and for specific airlines through either their own in house training establishments (BEA/BOAC later BA at Hamble), and some limited contracted work through a very few established flight training schools (such as Oxford and Perth,) although usually for Middle Eastern carriers. Nevertheless this training system gave the airlines an opportunity. As long as the insurers and the regulator didn't object they could take a basic 250 hour candidate with the requisite licences, train them on type and shovel them in the right hand seat at very low cost. This displaced many of the "better" experienced candidates unless they were in turn prepared to accept the reduced terms and conditions on offer. This was then further expanded by getting those low hour pilots to sign financial guarantees (bonds), then to pay for the type ratings themselves. In some cases this was further expanded to make the new pilots pay for their interiews, their uniform, even their "line training". Training establishments sprang up to take advantage of this new and expanding market by arranging all the financing, training and screening, and then offering a product to their contracting airline customers. All of this worked well untill the boom stopped!
Inevitably it wasn't going to last. Either an accident would have provoked the insurers to make this practice impractical, or the economy would take a downturn that placed a lot of experienced pilots out of work. Perhaps (if fortunetaly can ever be the right word) it was the latter. You now have a serious number of very experienced pilots who are prepared to accept the reduced and weakened terms on offer. Why would most airlines now even bother to look at anybody with 250 hours, when for the same money you can get all the experience and "ready to go" pilots that you could ever want, all assuming they do actually want anybody at all!
So that is part of the reason why you cannot get a sniff of a shiny jet job, or probably anything less at this time. It isn't very likely to change for the better anytime soon either.
I am very sympathetic for anybody who is currently saddled with a large debt and few realistic prospects. For what it is worth, that has often been the case in the past as well. Aviation has always been a very frustrating and difficult and demanding occupation to succeed in. Those with perserverance and a good back up plan stand every chance of success given an added good measure of luck. Unfortunetaly the "must have it now" generation, coupled with years of easy credit and irresponsible borrowing and lending, are about to cause a lot of people to fall back to Earth with a big bump! Given the cyclic nature of these things, the economy will eventually turn and things will get better, be it next year or in 10 years, who knows? The fittest and most adaptable will survive so will a few of the luckiest.
In the meantime, businesses (like individuals) need to survive as well, and many won't. For training schools this will be by adapting their product, creating new products of desire or percieved need, and continuing to show pictures of happy pilots in neatly starched uniforms and expensive sunshades standing next to polished jets under sunny skies.