No. With diplomats stuck inside barricaded compounds or loath to venture from expatriate residential ghettos, a Peace Corps volunteer is likely to be the only representative of the U.S. government that poor, rural populations ever see. As the State Department cuts back on its public diplomacy and cultural exchange programs, the Peace Corps’ predominantly young volunteers wind up carrying more and more of the responsibility for demonstrating that the United States still has good intentions abroad.

That puts the Peace Corps and its volunteers in an awkward position. The Peace Corps was created as a separate, independent agency so that it would not be subject to short-term foreign-policy objectives. Volunteers aren’t trained or expected to represent the U.S. government, its positions, or its interests. When the Peace Corps is characterized as an effective diplomatic weapon, it is thanks to the goodwill that volunteers generate toward the American people, not toward official U.S. policy.

Unfortunately, of the tens of millions of people with whom Peace Corps volunteers have interacted during the last 47 years, many have no idea what the Peace Corps is. Few have any idea that the Peace Corps is a U.S. government agency funded 100 percent by American taxpayers. On the plus side, over my five years as a country director in Cameroon, hundreds of villagers and officials told me how happy they were simply to have volunteers in their communities. Less encouraging is that just as often, I was told how fondly they remembered the Peace Corps volunteer from Rome, Paris, or Tokyo. It’s tough to be an effective diplomatic weapon and build goodwill among nations if people don’t understand what nation you came from in the first place.

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Best and brightest? As long as applicants meet the minimum standards and are healthy and persistent, the Peace Corps rarely rejects them outright.

Readers react: This article has inspired strong reactions from former Peace Corps volunteers. Read their responses here.

False. The Peace Corps learned how to recruit by emulating traditional fishermen in developing countries—toss a large net and hope for the best. For decades, this system has been notoriously ineffective, sending Spanish speakers to Arabic-speaking North Africa and offering the rare, farm-raised, French-speaking applicant a job teaching English in Mongolia.

The Peace Corps claims that about 1 in 3 applicants eventually becomes a volunteer, implying that the agency is about as selective as many “elite” schools in the United States. Not long ago, the figure commonly cited was 1 in 7. Either way, the truth is that so long as applicants meet the minimum standards and are healthy and persistent, the Peace Corps rarely rejects them outright. Each group sent overseas includes a few highly motivated and capable individuals—and then there are the vast majority who before joining the Peace Corps weren’t sure what to do with their lives, were fresh out of school and seeking a government-subsidized travel experience or something to bolster their résumé, or for whom the Peace Corps represented a chance to escape a humdrum life or recent divorce.

Once overseas, the chances of being kicked out are slim. I queried my fellow country directors in Africa to find out how many trainees they had sent packing due to unacceptable performance. The figure was less than 2 percent a year, meaning that once accepted, an individual—qualified or not, motivated or not—is pretty much assured of sticking around.

Unfortunately, the Peace Corps’ failure to recruit the best isn’t limited to volunteers. Few agencies rival the Peace Corps for the percentage of political appointees filling mission-critical positions. Hardly the sexiest of sinecures, the Peace Corps’ 29 political appointments tend to be lower-level politicians, third-tier party loyalists, the relatives of elected officials, or minor political underlings who get “parked” at the Peace Corps.

Rarely. Like many bureaucracies, the Peace Corps operates predominantly on inertia. The agency sends most volunteers to the same places where volunteers have been sent before, often to do the same thing volunteers were doing 20 and 30 years ago—regardless of whether their mission still makes sense.

Reviewing the most recent U.N. Human Development Report shows that the Peace Corps is active in 10 countries with “high human development,” 49 with “medium human development,” and 11 with “low human development.” With so few resources to achieve its goals, one wonders why the Peace Corps hasn’t concentrated what little it has on the world’s poorest countries, where the need is likely greatest. Granted, half a dozen of those places are either so unstable or dangerous that there’s little hope of achieving much. But even if the Peace Corps didn’t concentrate only on the poorest of the poor, one has to question what it is still doing in Romania and Bulgaria, two countries that have already become members of the European Union.