The Foreign Service Journal, June 2023

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | JUNE 2023 15 or morwe of exam-takers passed—thou- sands of people. The Service hires only a few hundred most years and certainly could select test-passers from disadvan- taged groups. Nor is the exam necessarily an impediment to the other sort of diver- sity Mr. Sherrell correctly emphasizes, that of varied life experience such as his as a janitor. Or mine. I may have been “pale and male” but was certainly not “Yale” back when that really mattered: the son of an auto mechanic, commuting to a work-study university, earning a master’s in night school not in foreign affairs but business administration, and spending seven years as an Army officer. That and barely pass- ing my oral exam should have ruled me out. What got me in was a high test score, rebutting his argument that the exam produces only a “very specific type.” The Question of Merit Finally, Mr. Sherrell’s headline ques- tion: Who merits being chosen? My answer: A Foreign Service career is not a reward for merit. The Service is a public institution serving the American people, who fund and rely on it for some pretty serious things. The Service, in granting admission, assures most of those entering a more than 20-year career with salary, benefits, and retirement superior to what most people have. Americans, and in particular those citizens striving to enter but whom their government does not select, thus must be sure that the Service has tried its best to select those competitively most qualified, however imperfect any selection system. To this end, there is no substitute for a quantifiable test that objectively docu- ments strength in communications and intellectual skills central to FSO success, particularly for duty at higher levels. n