From the Washington Post:
(excerpt; full article here)
In early 2011, Ramsey Day was completing his 21 / 2-year tour as head of USAID’s Montenegro office and evaluating his next job offer. The 36-year-old’s political career trajectory had been steep and fast. Starting in 2003, he had: served as an advance representative for Vice President Dick Cheney; worked on George Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign; won a political appointment to USAID’s Europe-Eurasia Bureau; been promoted to the bureau’s chief of staff, and then promoted again to chief of USAID’s Public Liaison Office.
With that track record, his successful stint in Montenegro, and his deep management experience, Day seemed positioned for advancement by almost any measure — any measure, that is, but his academic credentials. With a bachelor’s degree only, he was shut out of the running for positions at the next level of leadership in the U.S. Agency for International Development. His new assignment felt like it would be a step down: a post as general development officer in a remote area of Afghanistan, which (because it was also a move from civil to foreign service) came with a $50,000 pay cut — half of his Montenegro salary.
“That,” he says, “was not something I intended on doing.”
In a field that relies on technical expertise in specialties such as international economics, agriculture or democratic governance, and is dominated by those with advanced degrees, Day says his management skills took him only so far. He was a skilled problem solver who could identify development goals and assemble teams of experts to execute action plans in his host country, but he was doing it without the academic credentials. “I knew that at some point my lack of a master’s would catch up to me,” he says.
And so, instead of going to Afghanistan last year, Day went to graduate school. After weighing acceptance letters from American University’s School of International Service and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, Day left the mountains of Montenegro in August and moved to Cambridge, where he is now halfway through a one-year master’s in public administration....
