Welcome to the classic conundrum causing the pilot shortage. You pay $60-80k for flight training, sometimes in addition to college, only to instruct for two years at $1200 a month and then move on to a regional where you get paid a whopping $1700 a month. Not a very good return on investment, is it?

Some regionals have increased first year pay, but it's still nowhere near worth it. People only do it dreaming of landing that sweet Delta job one day, but that job offer might never come. So here we are, with regionals still paying too little and not enough pilots in training to fly their airplanes. Basic supply and demand would suggest pilots will become more valuable as the shortage gets worse, and therefore get paid more, and then the supply will increase when younger people see that it's a lucrative career again. But a lot of airlines think they're somehow exempt from the basic laws of economics. Good luck to them, I guess.