The importance of those clubs is definitely overblown, at least from the employers perspective.
Candidate A was in XYZ club, was “social chair” of the business fraternity (competitive entry), and now advises freshman who want to get into one of the business clubs.
Candidate B is part of the Investment club which has a 100K portfolio, and is part of the team which has realized a 12% gain in the last 9 months.
Candidate C has no clubs at all. She volunteers at a big non-profit hospital in the college city and helped the CFO speed up the monthly close from 7 days to 4 days. She has also been asked to work with the trustee who leads the Endowment committee, and is about to introduce a new and improved system for generating the 990 which will save weeks of time for the paid analysts on the payroll (plus give more accurate and speedy results to the Endowment committee members.)
How important are these clubs when a kid who is seriously interested in business can find relevant and high impact roles virtually anywhere with a little bit of shoe leather and initiative? I’ve interviewed kids who have taken Best Practices in supply chain management and introduced them to the local food pantry; kids who have launched a wildly successful marketing campaign to get parents of 3 and 4 year old’s to enroll their kids in high quality (and free) early childcare; kids who have worked with the sanitation department of their local city/town to increase participation in recycling programs; kids who have helped drive down solid food waste in their own college cafeterias by adopting “just in time” food delivery systems.
Kids endlessly obsess about “competitive” clubs where they can work on business simulation projects- when the world around them is filled with actual business problems!