Rodion Shitikov：靠多校申请拿到上海市政府奖学金

The scheme and the route

The Shanghai Government Scholarship is a municipal scheme rather than a national one, and it is awarded through the university rather than through an embassy. Type A covers the full package including a stipend; Type B is partial and usually amounts to a full tuition waiver.

This applicant applied to several business-focused institutions in Shanghai, and the result was a municipal scholarship at Shanghai Lixin University of Accounting and Finance. The route matters: municipal scholarships are assessed by the city and the university, which means they are not competing against the national CSC pool.

Why municipal schemes are worth a separate application

Applicants frequently treat the CSC as the only serious option. The accounts collected on this site suggest otherwise. Provincial and municipal schemes — Shanghai, Beijing, Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Guangdong among them — operate with their own quotas and their own committees, and they receive a fraction of the attention the CSC gets.

For a well-prepared applicant the practical consequence is that a single document set can be submitted to several schemes with different selection committees, and a rejection from one has no bearing on the others.

Reading the account

As with the companion case above, this report comes from a placement consultancy and should be read for the strategy rather than for the outcome statistics. The advertised service is assistance with applications; the underlying mechanism — parallel applications across several institutions within one city — is free to anyone who is willing to do the paperwork.

It is also worth noting what municipal scholarships generally exclude: they usually do not cover international travel, and the annual renewal conditions are the same as for the CSC, requiring satisfactory academic results each year.