This page is an outgrowth of my big list at User:Le Deluge/categories. As you'll see there, I had to grab a lot of red-listed categories for something else I was working on, and I ended up with a list of around 6500 (still only a fraction of the total, I will do the full list at some point) red-link categories that need either creating or editing the articles that point to them. I cleaned up over 1500 of them to get rid of most of the obvious typos, spam etc, but that still left nearly 5000 categories to create. So I need some help.
I've run some education-related filters on the list to generate the following, but inevitably that filtering process is pretty crude, there will be some on this list that shouldn't be and some still lurking in the main list, and feel free to have a quick look over that. But this list should keep you busy!
I've split them into "alumni", "Wikipedian", "schools" and "higher education". There's a bit of an art to creating these categories, first of all you have to look at the link and see if it's spelt correctly, in the correct format for Wikipedia (for instance, "Alumni" -> "alumni") and matching the main article name. If not, you will have to edit appropriately any articles that point to it.
To help you I've derived a potential institution category and article and put them after each "alumni" category, which will allow you to quickly check what the parent hierarchy looks like. If there is already a blue-linked matching institution category, you can be fairly sure that the proposed alumni category is correct. If there is a blue-linked institution article but the institution category is red-linked, then it's probably just a case of the institution article needing creating, but you should check that the blue-link article isn't just a redirect to a different spelling. Even if an article does exist, we don't necessarily want an alumnus category for every eg department within a university, some judgment is called for.
Then it's a good idea to look at the equivalent category of a big institution ideally from the same country (eg Category:Harvard University alumni - typically there will be a {{catmain}} link and some other bits in the header, plus at least an "institution people" category and a Category:Alumni by university or college in state/country. You can then use that as "inspiration" for the new category.
Anyway, enough talking, here are the categories!!
Alumni
editSchools
editHigher education
editWikipedians
editMy other work involved grabbing all of the Wikipedia... categories, so this is 100% of the Wikipedian alumnus categories. Look at Category:Wikipedians by alma mater to see if categories for the same institution already exists under a slightly different name.