The Manila Economic and Cultural Office (MECO) has asked local authorities to blacklist a Manila-based recruitment agency for allegedly demanding a huge sum of money for young students bound for Taipei under the Taiwan government’s scholarship program.

MECO chairman Silvestre H. Bello III said he already asked the Department of Migrant Workers (DMW) to take appropriate legal action against the JS Contractor following the complaint of 32 Filipino students who said they were asked to pay P45,000 each for their travel to Taiwan.

The amount was supposed to cover air fare, visa, pre-departure orientation seminar (PDOS) and overseas employment certificate (OEC).

But Bello explained that while plane tickets and student visa fee are shouldered by individual scholars, the students are not required to secure an OEC and undergo a pre-departure orientation seminar or PDOS.

He said a one way plane ticket to Taipei is P10,000, and the processing fee for a student visa costs only about P2,400.

Bello emphasized that only departing Filipino workers for deployment overseas are required to secure OEC from the DMW and go through PDOS for a fee.

“This agency must be punished for its nefarious activities. It has to be prevented from further victimizing hapless young people whose families are seeing fresh hopes with their inclusion in the scholarship program,” said Bello.

Bello stressed that the Taiwan Ministry of Education guidelines on the program provide that a university or college cannot accept scholars deployed through recruitment agencies.

The scholarship is a work-study program for Filipino students under Taiwan’s Academe-Industry Collaboration Program of the New Southbound Policy.

The recruitment of students is through a joint partnership with the Congregation of Missionary Sisters of Saint Charles Borromeo-Scalabrinians (MSCS) who approach different dioceses in the Philippines.

Selected universities arrange for internships with industrial/ semiconductor companies located at the Science and Industrial Park where the students are also provided with the opportunity for immediate employment after graduation.

The field of study is Bachelor of Science in Industrial Engineering major in Management (IEM). It is a three-year baccalaureate in-school program specially designed to integrate study and internship in eight semesters

For the first year, students study full time on-campus with free Mandarin lessons. In the second year, the internship training off campus starts. In the third year, students stay full time on-campus. In the fourth year, students do internship training off-campus.

So far, there are 201 recipients of the study-work program which started in March 2019.

The program already produced two batches of Filipino engineers this year with a big majority of them having secured jobs in Taiwan, while a few had returned to the Philippines to establish their own businesses and some pursuing higher studies.