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. 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. 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. The program was also the first major co-educational British graduate scholarship; one-third of the inaugural cohort in 1954 were women. With nearly 1,000 university-endorsed and selected applicants in recent years, it is among the most selective graduate scholarship for Americans, with an acceptance rate of around four percent, and as low as 3.2 percent in 2015. There are over 1,900 Marshall Scholar alumni. Many of these alumni have achieved distinctions and hold prestigious careers. In the government, current alumni include Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States, the director of the CIA, members of Congress and presidential cabinets, and state governors. Alumni are CEOs of companies such as LinkedIn and Dolby Labs, and managing editors of Time magazine and CNN. They are also deans of Yale Law School, Stanford Law School, the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard College; and presidents of Duke University, Wellesley College, the Cooper Union, and Caltech. They also include a Nobel Laureate, a winner of the Kluge Prize, four Pulitzer Prize–winning authors, twelve MacArthur Genius Grant awardees, NASA's youngest astronaut, two Oscar nominees, and one awardee of the Distinguished Flying Cross for service during the Iraq War. History Plans to establish Marshall Scholarships as a living memorial to United States Secretary of State George C. Marshall was announced by British Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden on 31 July 1952 and were enacted by the Parliament of the United Kingdom with the Marshall Aid Commemoration Act 1953. The act's passage was backed by "leaders of all political hues,"