Marshall Scholars

The Marshall Scholarship is a postgraduate scholarship for "intellectually distinguished young Americans [and] their country's future leaders" to study at any university in the United Kingdom. Created by the Parliament of the United Kingdom in 1953 as a living gift to the United States in recognition of the generosity of Secretary of State George C. Marshall and the Marshall Plan in the wake of World War II, the goal of the scholarship was to strengthen the Special Relationship between the two countries for "the good of mankind in this turbulent world." The scholarships are awarded by the Marshall Aid Commemoration Commission and are largely funded by the British Government.

With between 30 and 40 scholars selected annually, and with the number of university-endorsed applicants approaching 1000, in recent years it has been the most selective graduate scholarship for Americans, with an acceptance rate around 4%, and as low as 3.2% in 2015. It is widely considered one of the most prestigious scholarships for U.S. citizens, and along with the Fulbright Scholarship it is the only broadly available scholarship available to Americans to study at any University in the United Kingdom. The program was also the first major co-educational British graduate scholarship; one-third of the inaugural cohort in 1954 were women.

Currently, there are over 1,900 Marshall Scholar alumni. To date, two of the nine current Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States are alumni of the program (Neil Gorsuch and Stephen Breyer), while others have been prominent CEOs (LinkedIn, Dolby Labs), members of the United States Congress; members of the Presidential Cabinet of the United States; state Governors; the Deans of Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard College; presidents of seven universities or colleges, including Duke University, Wellesley College, the Cooper Union, and Caltech. They have also been leaders in many academic and professional disciplines, including one Nobel Laureate, four Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, two winners of the John Bates Clark Medal for the best American economist under the age of 40, twelve MacArthur Genius Grant awardees, and the President of the National Bureau of Economic Research, the Managing Editors of TIME and CNN and the International News Editor of The New York Times, NASA's youngest Astronaut, two Oscar nominees, one winner of the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, and one awardee of the Distinguished Flying Cross for service during the Iraq War.

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