Colleges and universities continually seek to foster the leadership development of undergraduate students through curricular and co-curricular opportunities and experiences. This study examined the effects and potential contributions of participation in campus-based leadership trainings on college students' leadership development with special consideration for gender and racial background. To better understand the relationship between campus-based trainings and leadership development, data from the Wabash National Study of Liberal Arts Education (WNS) was utilized. The WNS was a multi-institutional, longitudinal dataset made up of 47 four-year colleges and universities from 21 states throughout the United States. This study mark's one of the first multi-year, multi-institution longitudinal studies to investigate the relationship between campus-based leadership trainings and leadership development. The results of the study pointed to several over-arching themes. The first theme was that a student's background and leadership experience prior to college matter. Next, a student's curricular success matters, and influences their leadership gains throughout all aspects of the SCM. The interactions students have with peers who are different from themselves matters. Leadership development opportunities need to be intentionally designed. Finally, campus-based leadership trainings offer a potential programmatic option for institutions to help develop their students as socially responsible leaders, regardless of backgrounds and other experiences.

The purpose of this study was to ascertain the existence of student leadership development programs and to explore the similarities and differences in the way students in higher education are recruited and retained into the culture and attitudes of leadership, and how they are afforded meaningful leadership opportunities to practice the skills they have learned, in two separate higher educational institutions. These two institutions were East Tennessee State University, Johnson City campus, Tennessee, and the University of the West Indies, Mona campus, Jamaica, West Indies. I was also concerned with the existing perceptions of leadership and leadership training delivery and how this impacted the attitudes that students experienced in accessing leadership development provisions. The methods and procedures used in gathering data for this study were qualitative and included such ethnographic techniques as interviewing, surveying and a brief content analysis utilizing the communicative documents of both institutions. The population consisted of students, staff and faculty of both universities. The findings demonstrated that student leadership development programs did exist at both institutions, but that the philosophies upon which leadership development was based were culturally different. Also, although the methods of recruitment, retention and leadership practice bore aspects of similarities, in many cases the leadership styles, which facilitated these, were quite different. Of particular importance is the fact, that, in comparison with ETSU, which has a rich national heritage of American leadership development research, the University of the West Indies does not have such a nationally research-rich educational leadership background. This bears great implications for the future of leadership development and the necessity for in-depth research.