This is very well studied. It turns out that being gifted intellectually doesn't really correlate with success in life. So no, you wouldn't expect somebody to be successful just because there were gifted. Being gifted is not enough. One of the smartest men who ever lived (his IQ dwarfs that of Einstein) has spent most of his career as a bouncer at a nightclub. There's a lot more to success than being really, really smart. Most of it has to do with where you're from and who your parents are.
Fatalism at it's best...
Her last line, maybe, but! Intelligence isn't everything. By itself, it's not really much of anything. Take me, for example.
When I finished my M.Sc. project, my thesis supervisor told me I was, hands-down, the smartest graduate student he had ever worked with, and even though I was switching fields to do my PhD, he was certain I'd excel.
He was wrong. I had a total nervous breakdown, dropped out, and may very well be in my parents basement in another couple of months, because I cannot find employment either. Intelligence just wasn't enough. To go with the nerdiest possible analogy, you need a balanced character sheet. I passed the Int check easily, but rolled very poorly on Con and For. (and this is D20, not Shadowrun-- I didn't get any flaw points for my mental illness, unless I foolishly poured them back into Int)
It's very hard to get a retail job with a master's degree, and it's equally hard to explain away the gap on your resume if you leave it out. (Indeed, in this job market, they don't give you the chance to explain away any gaps.) If I knew a guy? Or was fortunate enough to be born into a business-owning family? I'd be fine, my ticket would be written already. I know this because I know plenty of folk who had their tickets written.
It's equally easy to imagine that, without some of the benefits of my white-middle-class upbringing, I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did, and that without a genetically inherited mental illness, I would have gone much further. You can be the greatest genius in the world, but if your born in a Haitian slum and die of cholera at age 16, what the hell good does it do you?