Filipino American Scholarship

This eighth day of Filipino American History Month brings information about Filipino American scholarship. As you know, the benevolent assimilation rhetoric was scattered throughout the policies related to the Philippines during the early twentieth century. In the Philippines, teachers came over from the United States of America and fanned out around all the islands. Filipinos were taught English, how to brush their teeth, and how to say their prayers. At the same time, many Filipinos came to the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century to go to school as pensionados, government-sponsored student traveling from the Philippines to the United States.

Established in 1903, the pensionado program provided government scholarships to students supposedly chosen by merit from each Philippine province; in actuality, local prominence and connections played a major role in the selection process. In return for each year of education in the United States, pensionados were required to work for the government in the Philippines for the same length of time.

The pensionado project lasted officially from 1903 to 1910. More than 200 Filipino students, eight of whom were women, were sponsored by the American colonial government and studied in U.S. schools such as University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington, Cornell, Notre Dame, Purdue, Yale, Wisconsin, Northwestern, Nebraska, Colorado, Illinois, Indiana, George Washington, Iowa, Ohio State Michigan State, and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, among others. Some attended technical and vocational schools, while a few first enrolled in high school.