Individual workers’ social skills or soft skills, including leadership, communication, and other interpersonal skills, play a pivotal role in labour market outcomes and are valued by employers. Competencies related to leadership are key attributes for employers. Beyond a strong grade point average, leadership roles and participation in extra-curricular activities are important factors in an employer’s decision to hire one candidate over another. Thus, considering the value that leadership experience provides not only for businesses, organisations, and industries, but also for more beneficial labour market outcomes for individuals, such as a faster transition from education to work or higher wages and earnings, higher education makes for an ideal setting for competency development. It also highlights the responsibility of training the professional and community leaders of tomorrow.

The development of college students as leaders has been one of the main purposes of higher education. Universities and colleges set the interest in student leadership as a priority area and add the core concept of leadership and relevant skills for quality education into their criteria. A growing number of leadership programmes have emerged at institutions ranging from one-day workshops to stand-alone programmes and full degree-granting programmes. Students can also participate in extra-curricular activities and groups such as student organisations, campus publications, student governments, fraternity or sororities, intercollegiate or intramural sports, or academic groups/honour societies, and they can also hold formal positions and play a leadership role. Compared with such activities and curriculum programmes, being a positional leader typically brings much more autonomy and authority to students and helps them develop competences (not only leadership) more effectively in real situations. Hence, it is easier for employers and researchers to identify student leadership experiences by checking the roles they have played.

In the context of China, employers in governmental organisations, public institutions, state-owned enterprises, and many private businesses (especially in managerial positions) prefer students with experience in leadership and formal positions. They usually set their preference clear in recruitment advertisements and give priority to student leaders. There are several student organisations in Chinese universities and colleges, which are important elements of campus culture. Being a positional leader in student organisations is the most frequent type of route that college students follow in China. The government has noted the importance of leadership education and asked higher education institutions to provide more support and training for student leaders.

Students, employers, and HEIs have been in consensus for student leadership to have a positive influence on the labour market in the global context. However, few empirical results can clearly tell us how much wage premium student leadership experience can bring to students’ first job, and the hints for the relationship between prior leadership positions and successful employment. While the importance of student leadership experience is a commonly agreed concept, the effectiveness of this experience on individual performance in the labour market is unclear. Thus, based on a Chinese college undergraduate panel survey, our main purpose is to explore the impact of formal leader positions in colleges on individuals’ career prospects by estimating the wage premium of student leader experience. Our secondary purpose is to link the factors that affect being a student leader and the outcomes of this in the labour market and discuss the set of skills to explain the influence of leadership experience. We believe that our analyses of these two points will contribute to students, parents, and HEIs by clarifying the role of serving as a student leader in colleges and helping students transition from higher education to the labour market.

Our study used data collected from the Beijing College Students Panel Survey (BCSPS) in China, which was organized by the National Survey Research Center (NSRC) at Renmin University of China. BCSPS collected student information on demographic characteristics, family background, and performance in venues such as colleges and the labour market from 15 public universities in Beijing, China. BCSPS adopted the ‘probability proportional to size sampling method’ and a three-stage sampling design including universities, college majors, and students. It conducted longitudinal survey on two cohorts of students enrolled in 2006 (juniors, 2298 samples) and 2008 (freshman, 2473 samples) for five consecutive years. Respondents, with their own consent, were gathered in a fixed location to complete the baseline survey, and they were invited to respond to follow-up questionnaires through telephone and email in the following years. All survey personnel were recruited, trained, and dispatched by professional supervisors at the NSRC. The follow-up rate of this panel data was over 90%, and there was no significant difference in missing samples in variables such as sex, majors, universities, and the like. We used Stata 14 to process the data in this study. First, we used the multiple logistic regression model to analyse students who became student leaders. Second, the ordinary least squares regression model (OLS) was used to estimate the wage premium of student leader experience. Finally, the difference-in-differences model (DID) was used to measure the change in several competencies before and after serving as a student leader to demonstrate how the skills of a student leader can truly improve.

This study analysed the impact of Chinese college graduate student leaders’ experience on their starting salary. Many factors, such as family background and education experience, affect becoming a student leader. The wage premium of a student leader in a college on starting salaries was approximately 7%. Our findings indicate that being a student leader can enhance students’ learning, problem-solving, and interpersonal skills, which as mediating variables, also explain over half of their wage premium effect. Leader experience can enhance individual leadership-related skills and employability, help students transfer into the labour market, and provide higher returns in the early stages of their career. The channel of capital improvement of leadership experience was a significant factor that positively affects the future earnings of students and the workforce. It is a challenge for HEIs to go beyond their curriculum of educating students within their specific fields and ensure that enough weight is put on upskilling them with the necessary qualifications and proficiency that would serve them in the workforce. Given this growing expectation, it has become even more vital that students at universities take part in programmes to consolidate their existing leadership skills and to add more to them through critical analysis and meaningful interaction with peers and opinion leaders. Faculty at higher education might think of exerting more emphasis on ameliorating graduate outcomes through extensive student leadership programmes. This will not only enhance the employability of their students and increase their chances of finding suitable jobs with high paying income, but also elevate their institutional recognition.

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