Who is Taking our Classes? A Single-Institution Study of Leadership Student Personality Types

Students register for leadership classes with a number of assumptions about leaders and their traits. These assumptions both explicitly and implicitly affect students’ self-selection for leadership studies courses. This study compared the personality types of first-year leadership students at a Research 1 public university to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) types of the general population. In several introductory leadership courses, students were given accessto a free, shortened version of the MBTI entitled the Jung Typology Test. The data showed highly significant differences between the sample group and the general population in relation to their four-letter typologies. A discussion of these differences, specifically in the ways that we talk about leadership and recruit students to our programs, is presented.