I hear what JohnBurke is saying, but how many professional industries rely on experienced, professional employees by having them simply meander from job to job, hoping for and conniving ways to get that experience? Does Mercedes-Benz hire mechanics and assemblyline workers this way? Are medical professionals educated and groomed this way? Does the US military find pilots this way?
I think these symposiums are right when they say more structure needs to exist in the training pipeline for this career. We have to change the way we think in the US about "dues earning" and "rugged individualism"; this doesn't wash in an increasingly high-tech globally competitive society. In fact, i don't think any first world country has as bad of a directionless education system as the US. I don't know of anywhere else where students are told to just get a degree and then wind up working somewhere totally out of their field.
With all this said, there is no substitute for experience in this career. Airlines don't want to pay for it and in the past the military supplied it. Also in the past, there were no regionals; if you couldn't afford to fly, you took Greyhound. Maybe we need to think about aviation training using the merchant marine academy example.