Sorry to hear about your Google slap, but I would agree with several associated responses to this post.
With that said, having made the method public in addition to the sites success really contributed significantly the websites downfall and it's connection to scholarship links has no doubt degraded the usefulness of these types of links.
With the sheer publicity of the method, many of the scholarship link targets are likely to be spammed and have thus lost their purity with respect to building a powerful link profile.
Since the cat is out of the bag, I think the best advice is to avoid these links "for now" until much of the spam has been cleaned up.
I'm sure that over time these types of links will recover but in the meantime my conclusion is that these are no longer good linking targets.
I'm sure that perspective is sure to come with some disagreement and differing opinions but if you've got a site you care about I'd stay away from scholarship links for now.