In EA Israel we are working on expanding and organizing what we can offer to universities and which initiatives we’d like to promote. We’ll share our conclusions for review later on, but for now I’m interested in getting more ideas and having more examples of (hopefully successful) projects initiated globally.
The scope is large, and may include at least the following:
Student outreach (like Fellowship programs, introductory courses and speaking events)
Student research support (coaching like Effective Thesis, or grant programs)
Supporting student projects (focusing students’ work on more important issues)
Domain-specific initiatives (like Alt-Protein student groups, topical conferences, or academic research centers)
Outreach to senior academics (by targeting specific individuals, by giving talks, by broadly engaging with the academic literature)
Improving targeted academic institutions (by supporting some program operationally or financially, by influencing research priorities, by metascientific-oriented work)
etc.
Not sure if this is a direct answer of your question, but what worked good for me was using my position on my university to allow students to work on ALLFED topics as their master thesis. This resulted in one very good master thesis on loss of industry scenarios.
Maybe you could reach out to academics with a bunch of possible thesis topics that they could do in cooperation with EA orgs. If they are a good fit for the researcher you reached out to, this might be an interesting offer for them.
Just off the top of my head, take a look at the things done by BERI, SERI, other “existential risk initiative” projects, FLI, Effective Thesis, GovAI, ALLFED, and various projects of CSER and OpenPhil that support universities (e.g., the Forethought Foundation, 80,000 Hours). This list is very incomplete, but it gestures in the direction of the kinds of things that I see as EA-Academia collaborations or cross-pollinations.