QFE
I would never suggest to a young airline pilot wannabe that I don't think he's cut out for it as I have no real basis for an opinion.
What even as a full time professional instructor you haven't got a basis for opinion to see if someone will acheive something that you hold i.e a CPL(A).
So who would be the best person to refer said student to now for an opinion.
Errm well George Semel and WWW and perhaps even I would be a good start but hey what would we know as we only
dabble in instruction part time
Sarcasm aside I agree with WWW have seen 3 of my schools continue with students who stated at the outset that they wanted nothing but commercial who were undoubtedly going to have to pay well over the odds. The IR usually does the trick.
On the PPL side though I remember only 3 students I have met who would never achieve a safe PPL standard even on their best days. I told them as much and they continued flying in the knowledge that they would only ever fly as students, 2 still fly and still enjoy it (no sight of a licence though), fair play to them.
I at first thought the smaller the school the more likely this would be but in reality as most are capable of PPL what I found was that the real villains of these stories are the commercial schools who continue with students sometimes lying just for the sake of extra revenue. I'd like to say this is the minority but if I did I'd be lying. Business it appears to some will always be business.