Right now, when demand for new pilots is at an all-time low and will stay this way for a couple of years, it would be the perfect time to raise the entry requirements for qualifying as a pilot. GA in Europe is not as developed as in the USA, so the 1500-hour rule won't really be plausible for Europe, but requiring at least a college degree in a technical subject would be reasonable. Of course, with grandfather rights, allowing those who have obtained their licences before a certain date to keep them, degree or not.
To those who think that higher education is too much to require from a pilot, spare a thought about the many, many countries where this has always been the case. Even in Europe, pilot education in many countries was in the form of a degree before PART-FCL kicked in. And the older generation of aircraft were nowhere near as complex as the modern (although highly automated) ones. Not to mention that, some decades ago, pilots were just that - pilots. There were other crew members to take care of aircraft systems and navigation. Some 15 years ago, this was still the case in many Eastern European airlines which flew Soviet aircraft right until late 2006.