The State Department has drawn criticism for being dominated by white men, especially in senior jobs. The new statistics show an aspect of workforce diversity that has gotten less attention: educational background.
Eighty years ago, the people — almost certainly all white men — who wrote an “editors’ column” for the Foreign Service Journal decried the “pleasant fiction” that much of the State Department was dominated by a “Harvard clique.”
According to the data from the Government Accountability Office, the odds favored both such groups even when controlling for other factors, such as race and gender. But the apparent advantage fades the higher up a Foreign Service staffer climbs. “If you’re organized and you can write better than somebody else, you can market yourself better than someone else. And most of the Ivy League graduates do well,” said Patrick Kennedy, a former undersecretary of State for management. “But as time goes on, that education advantage gets replaced by on-the-job experience.”In November 1936, the Foreign Service Journalwhat was described as a register of career members of the service.
The department has made concerted diversity pushes over the past 20 years in particular, in part through fellowships and other recruitment programs., to describe the State Department and other government bodies that deal with national security and foreign policy.on diversity at the State Department, including how race, ethnicity and gender matched with promotion rates. The study covered fiscal years 2002 through 2018, touching three presidential administrations.
The GAO found that an Ivy League graduate seeking to be promoted from Class 4 to Class 3 had 22.5 percent higher odds of moving up than a fellow Foreign Service employee without such a degree. That person had 12.6 percent higher odds of moving from Class 3 to Class 2 than one without the Ivy credential.
The GAO counted both undergraduate and graduate degrees in running through the data; it’s common for a Foreign Service employee to have a graduate degree. In considering whether a person’s alma mater may have influenced their promotion, the GAO controlled for a range of other factors, including age when hired at State, linguistic ability, gender and race.
The data provided by State had specifications: it counted the school where Foreign Service staffers — either specialists or generalists — had earned their highest degree; it lumped together all campuses of a university system, such as the massive University of California; and it covered only staffers who had applied after calendar year 2013 and were hired.
The department “represents America to the world, so our team should reflect the millions of Americans outside the Boston-D.C. corridor,” PompeoHis statements puzzled U.S. diplomats, who noted that their colleagues appeared to hail from all across America. It’s possible that Pompeo was conflating where staffers went to college with where they grew up. A spokesperson told POLITICO that “no data on State Department employees’ hometown of origin is collected or available.
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