Two recent Yale graduates — Rohit Goyal ’19 and Akhil Rajan ’21 B.A./M.A. — are among the 41 winners of the 2022 Marshall Scholarships, a prestigious honor that allows future American leaders to study any subject for up to three years at top universities in the United Kingdom.
The two were chosen from nearly 1,000 applicants for the award, which is funded by the British government and other British institutions. They will begin their graduate studies in September 2022.
Named for former U.S. Secretary of State George C. Marshall, the scholarship program began in 1953 as a gesture of gratitude to the American people for the assistance offered to the U.K. after World War II under the Marshall Plan. Former Marshall Scholars include six Pulitzer Prize-winners, one Nobel laureate, 14 MacArthur Fellows, two Academy Award nominees, two Supreme Court justices, and a NASA astronaut.
Goyal earned a B.A. in economics at Yale and was elected into Phi Beta Kappa. As a senior, he led Yale to a victory in the Federal Reserve Board’s National Fed Challenge, an undergraduate team competition in which the students analyze economic and financial conditions and formulate a monetary policy recommendation. He also began a discussion series on economic policy for students and faculty. He has done research in economic methodology and labor economics and hopes to examine these fields in greater depth as a Marshall Scholar. He will study economics and philosophy at the London School of Economics.
Rajan earned a B.A. and M.A. in political science at Yale. He studies spatial inequality in the context of both political and economic divides. In the past, he has worked on policy for campaigns at the local, Senate, and presidential levels, was well as in his work as a fellow of the Kerry Initiative at Yale, an interdisciplinary program that tackles pressing global challenges, and as a political appointee in the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the Biden-Harris administration. In his academic research, Rajan has studied the effects of gerrymandering, the political behavior of underrepresented candidates, and the impacts of campaign finance on American democracy. He will pursue a degree in comparative social policy at Oxford University.
