Not a bad pitch, but I suppose the main difficulty is getting the pitch to potential students in the first place, which is much harder past the very top schools

Not a bad pitch, but I suppose the main difficulty is getting the pitch to potential students in the first place, which is much harder past the very top schools. If the nature of your funding allows it keeping a close eye out for motivated undergrads and actually employing them could work to raise your profile to attract grad students. As I understand it identifying good undergrad researchers is quite hard, but it may be a good low-financial-commitment way to spin up a group of sorts?