[knzhou]

What can you do?

Suppose you magically double the number of faculty positions. Within one year all of the new positions could be filled a hundred times over. Now you've back to the exact same scenario, except that now you also have twice as many slots for grad students, too.

[alexgmcm]

Create more national labs, research institutes etc. that widen out the end of the funnel without widening the start.

/fellow physicist who went into DS

[knzhou]

Perhaps, but many of these labs are extensions of universities. I do research at SLAC, a national lab which shares grad students with Stanford.