Hsinchu International School opened in 1981, just as the Hsinchu Science Park was taking shape. The school was not founded to serve the Park; the two rose together. Philips, the Dutch electronics company, asked a teaching couple, Mr. and Mrs. Lines, to set up an English-medium school for the children of its growing multinational workforce in Hsinchu. According to the school's own account, the people who gave it its name included the Lines, an executive from Philips Taiwan, the then superintendent of Taipei American School, and Dr. Alvin Tong, one of the founders of the Hsinchu Science Park itself.
That last detail is the whole story in miniature. The school and the Park grew up together, named in part by the same hands, and as Philips wound down its Hsinchu presence over the following decades, the Park's expansion supplied a new generation of international families to take the place of the Dutch ones. The school's formal Chinese name, 新竹荷蘭國際學校, still carries the word Holland, a fossil of the founding that the school has never erased. Dutch itself was never taught.
For a family choosing a school today, the practical meaning of all this history is continuity. HIS is the oldest international school in Hsinchu, it has been led by the same founding family for over four decades, and Mrs. Rowena Lines remains its head. In a city whose international schools are mostly young, that depth of institutional memory is the thing HIS offers that none of its neighbors can.
Look at where HIS graduates go, and an unusual pattern stands out for a school of around 180 students. Alongside the universities one expects from a strong college-prep school, the school's own list of graduate destinations features a striking concentration of arts and music conservatories: the Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute of Music, the Manhattan School of Art and Design, Juilliard. That is not a typical spread for a tiny international school in a semiconductor town, and it tells you something about the place.
A school this size cannot run a large arts faculty, so a thread like this usually reflects something cultural rather than structural: a community that takes the creative side of a child seriously, teachers with the time to notice and nurture an individual talent, and the kind of small-school attention that lets a young musician or artist be seen. HIS describes its emphasis as a well-rounded education in a warm, secure atmosphere, and the conservatory destinations are the evidence that the description is more than a brochure line.
Our reading for families: HIS is a school that knows its students as individuals, with a particular gift for the child whose strengths are not only academic. Families with a creatively inclined child should ask directly about how the school has supported past students into the arts, and ask to speak with the teachers who would work with their child.
In 1981, Philips Electronics employed a growing number of multinational families in Hsinchu and needed somewhere to educate their children in English. The company had run a Dutch company school, but its workforce was no longer only Dutch, so it asked Mr. and Mrs. Lines to establish and operate an international school taught entirely through English. At the start it was simply Hsinchu International School, the name it has always gone by.
In 1988 the school became fully independent, registered and licensed through the Dutch Trade Office as Hsinchu Holland International School, because of the number of Dutch students and parents at the time. That is the origin of the Holland in its Chinese name, 新竹荷蘭國際學校. As Philips reduced its Hsinchu presence and fewer Dutch families came, the Science Park drew international families from many more countries, and HIS evolved from a company school into the general international school of the city.
In 2007 the school moved to its current purpose-built five-storey campus in Xiangshan District, adjacent to Xiangshan Municipal Elementary School. It grew from an early K-7 program into a full PreK-12 school, and the secondary division earned accreditation from the Western Association of Schools and Colleges in 2011. Through all of it, the founding Lines family has continued to lead the school, with Mrs. Rowena Lines as head of school and elementary principal.
HIS teaches an American-style international curriculum in English across the full PreK-12 range, drawing on US standards frameworks, with English-language support for students who need it.
The academic program follows American curriculum standards, with the elementary and secondary divisions building toward a US-style high school diploma. The school draws on recognized US frameworks for its core subjects and provides English as a Second Language support, reflecting a student body of around twenty nationalities in which many children are learning in their second or third language. Class sizes run from 10 to 20, with roughly fourteen students per teacher, the kind of ratio that lets a small school teach to the individual.
Advanced Placement courses are available in the upper grades for university-bound students, though the school does not publish a fixed AP roster, and families should ask which subjects run in a given year, since at a school this size course availability depends partly on enrollment. The whole-child emphasis extends beyond the core: the arts, music, and a rounded co-curricular life are part of what the school is known for, as its graduate destinations reflect.
One point of precision worth understanding: HIS holds WASC accreditation for its secondary division. That is the accreditation that matters most for university applications, since it covers the high school years and the diploma, but it is a narrower statement than whole-school accreditation, and a family comparing schools should read it accurately rather than assume it spans every grade.
HIS publishes a list of graduate destinations rather than score data. We present what the school states, attributed, and name plainly what is not released.
According to the school, its graduates have gone on to universities including Stanford, Caltech, Oxford, and St Andrews, with recent students at New York University, the University of British Columbia, Penn State, the University of Hong Kong, and a notable cluster of arts and music conservatories: the Johns Hopkins Peabody Institute, Juilliard, and the Manhattan School of Art and Design. For a school of around 180 students, the breadth is real, and the creative-arts thread is distinctive.
What HIS does not publish is quantitative: no AP score distributions, no SAT or ACT averages, no year-by-year matriculation breakdown. For a school this size that absence is ordinary, not a warning sign, and small graduating classes make any single year's numbers a thin guide anyway. The useful step for a comparing family is the direct one we recommend across this guide: ask admissions where recent graduates were placed and how the school supported them there.
HIS runs a direct, assessment-and-interview admissions process appropriate to its size, with the foreign-passport requirement as the one hard gate.
Based on the school's published profile and what its history and scale reward. HIS is a specific kind of school, and the fit is legible.
Harland works with Hsinchu families remotely, with the same 1-on-1 teaching we provide in Taipei. For HIS students, our work spans the entry assessment, the all-English classroom, and the university years.
In Hsinchu, the first question is not which school is best but which schools your family is eligible to attend. These three sit at the other points of that map.
A consultation with our Student Coordinator is the fastest way to think the decision through with someone who is not trying to sell you the school. We work with Hsinchu families remotely, and we can talk through the entry assessment, what a small school does and does not offer, or how HIS compares with the other Hsinchu schools your family is eligible for. We start by listening.