A Peruvian Student Built a Free ‘Tinder for Scholarships’ — 15,000 Have Used It
Key Facts
- —What happened Peruvian engineering student, 22, built Becas para Migajear, a free Tinder-style scholarship filter (US$…).
- —How big a jump Over 15,000 youth in Peru, Mexico, and Chile used it in ~3 months, reaching 400,000+ on social media.
- —The real story The platform filters public scholarships from governments, universities, and organisations, cutting 80 announcements to two (US$…).
- —The catch It only lists public offers, so applications, deadlines, and paperwork stay yours (US$…).
- —Who it touches It serves students like the founder, who escaped extreme poverty via a Pronabec Beca 18 scholarship (US$…).
- —What comes next The pool reportedly exceeds 500 scholarship offers (up from 200), at rauenciencia.com, no app needed.
Scholarship money is not hard to find because it is scarce. It is hard to find because nobody keeps a list.
There is a specific kind of frustration familiar to anyone who has tried to fund a degree abroad. The money exists. Governments offer it, universities offer it, international organisations offer it. What nobody offers is a single place to look. A 22-year-old in Lima got tired of that and built one: a Tinder for scholarships, with the cheerfully self-deprecating name Becas para Migajear — roughly, scholarships for scrounging.
Why a Tinder for scholarships, and not a list
Raúl Jáuregui Penny studies environmental engineering at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia. He knows the terrain: he grew up in extreme poverty in eastern Lima, got to university on a Pronabec Beca 18 state scholarship, and has won fifteen scholarships and exchanges himself. Like most students who go looking for funding, he found the information scattered across ministry pages, university notice boards and embassy PDFs, each with its own deadlines and no way to compare them.
So he built a platform that gathers those public offers in one place and uses AI to sort and check them, then filters against what you tell it about yourself — what you study, where you are, what level you are at. Instead of reading eighty announcements to find the two that apply to you, you see the two.
The Tinder comparison is his, and it is literal rather than romantic: you swipe right to keep an offer and left to discard it, and finish with a shortlist. On how many offers there are, the accounts differ slightly — the state news agency Andina reported about 200 in the pool with a goal of 500, while Jáuregui told another outlet a day earlier that a newer version already passes 500. It runs in a browser at rauenciencia.com, with no app to install.
What it has done so far
In roughly three months the platform has been used by more than 15,000 young people in Peru, Mexico and Chile, with a reach the founder puts at over 400,000 — a social-media figure rather than a user count, so read it as attention, not sign-ups. For a free tool built by one undergraduate, that is still a lot of people who could not find what they were looking for.
It is worth being clear about what it is and is not. It does not award scholarships. It gathers, checks and filters offers that are already public. The applications, the deadlines and the paperwork are still yours to handle.
It has grown almost entirely through social media, where Jáuregui posts as Raw en Ciencia, rather than through any school or ministry — which is both how it reached 15,000 people in three months and the reason many of the students who need it most have still never heard of it.
Why this matters if you are raising a family here
For expatriate and Latin American families alike, the cost of higher education is one of the two or three numbers that shape where you live. Scholarships change that arithmetic, but only if you know they exist, and information about them is unevenly distributed in a way that quietly favours whoever already has a well-connected school counsellor.
A free filter does not fix that. It does narrow the gap slightly, and it does so for a teenager in Iquitos on the same terms as one in Lima. If you have a child approaching university, or you are considering a postgraduate degree yourself while living in the region, it costs nothing to look.
The broader point is one worth noticing. The most useful pieces of technology in Latin America this decade have not been the funded ones. They have been small, practical fixes to problems the people building them were personally living with — and this is a textbook example.
Background: our peru raises guide.
More: Peru news in English, every day from The Rio Times.
Sources: El Peruano — Peruvian student creates a Tinder for scholarships; Stakeholders — Becas para Migajear, the Peruvian platform connecting students to scholarships
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Tinder for scholarships?
It is Becas para Migajear, a free platform created by Raúl Jáuregui Penny, a 22-year-old environmental engineering student at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia in Lima. You enter a study profile and then swipe through publicly available scholarship offers — from governments, universities and international organisations — keeping the ones you qualify for. It runs in a browser at rauenciencia.com, with no app to download.
Does it cost anything?
No. The platform is free to use, and the scholarships it lists are public offers rather than paid placements. It does not award funding itself; it gathers, checks and filters announcements that are already open, and you still make each application directly.
How many people have used it?
More than 15,000 young people in Peru, Mexico and Chile in roughly three months since launch, with a reach the founder puts at over 400,000 — a social-media reach figure rather than a user count. Andina reported about 200 opportunities in the pool with a goal of 500; Jáuregui has since said a newer version exceeds 500.
Is it only for Peruvians?
No. Users are reported in Peru, Mexico and Chile, and the scholarships aggregated include offers from foreign governments, universities and international organisations in Europe and the United States, which are typically open to applicants across the region rather than to one nationality.
This article was produced by The Rio Times’ automated newsroom system. How we use AI · Report an error · Editorial responsibility: Matthias Camenzind, Editor-in-Chief