Abstract
Lack of studies linking student support services and financial assistance, particularly the Department of Science and Technology (DOST) undergraduate scholarship, to college outcomes such as persistence has been one of the issues in STEM education in the Philippines. Even though previous findings have shown the clear impact of financial support on student success, local researchers have only focused on student satisfaction with the Tertiary Education Subsidy (TES) and persistence. This is why the researchers decided to determine the relationship between the satisfaction of scholarship services provided by the DOST in terms of scholarship updates, support for scholars’ organizations and activities, staff assistance, support for scholarship-related problems, and scholarship benefits and college persistence components, namely: academic integration, social integration, support service satisfaction, degree commitment, institutional commitment, and academic conscientiousness. A descriptive-correlational design was utilized with a convenience sampling technique to select 67 DOST scholars as respondents. Self-reported assessments were used to measure the variables. The results show that the students were very satisfied with the scholarship services, and they are highly persistent in all indicators except academic conscientiousness. However, there is no significant relationship between satisfaction with scholarship services and college persistence. Studying other potential variables related to scholarship services and implementing policies to improve college persistence is recommended.