User-friendly precision searches
There are thousands of scholarships. According to FTOPE statistics, NT$3 billion in scholarships is awarded to 300,000 students in Taiwan every year. Since the scholarships are mostly allocated from the interest paid on financial deposits, there is at least NT$300 billion in educational funds, an impressive sum.
However, although resources are plentiful, Taiwan never had a well-built system to integrate them in one place, leaving those resources scattered, so that scholarships were often incompletely distributed. It was a headache for those awarding the funds, and for students wanting to apply for scholarships, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.
The Scholarship Information Platform was set up to deal with those issues. Benefitting from Wang Chen-shiuen’s experience in the US, users can conduct precise searches based on household registration location, schools and departments attended, academic scores, and special status or conditions such as low-income family, family with disabilities, overseas Chinese student, “new immigrant,” sporting achievement or other special talent, family clan association, parents’ union membership, life insurance holder, and so forth. It also covers students of different ages, from elementary school to graduate students, and even mainland Chinese students and foreign students.
In the process of inventorying scholarships, Wang has learned something. “Scholarships are the most representative form of social pluralism, altruism, and public welfare,” he says. Precisely because these resources are not concentrated or monopolized, but circulate freely among the people, we can say that the more democratic, open, and pluralistic a society is, the more abundant and diverse its scholarships will be, symbolizing the vitality of civil society.
The platform brings together data on nearly 10,000 scholarships. Users can conveniently conduct precision searches according to various categories.