It looks like Google’s Summer of Code program is back. Eclipse participated last year with some great results and will do it again this year. There is currently a wiki entry for people to post possible ideas that students can work on for projects.
I encourage various Eclipse projects to post ideas that a) would be cool to work on for students and b) useful to the Eclipse project so it can possibly be incorporated (this has the added benefit of students possibly becoming active contributors or committers). The ECF and Mylar projects last year had some good results out of the Eclipse Summer of Code projects, so please consider coming up with good ideas and mentoring some awesome students. This is a good exercise in community building 😉
There is also an EclipseCon panel this year that will discuss some of the projects that happened last year, and what worked and what didn’t.