A recent study by Greenberger et al. (2008) looked at student's sense of entitlement in order to see where it comes from. Here's the abstract ...
Abstract Anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in entitled attitudes and behaviors of youth in school and college settings. Using a newly developed scale to assess ‘‘academic entitlement’’ (AE), a construct that includesexpectations of high grades for modest effort and demanding attitudes towards teachers, this research is the first to investigate the phenomenon systematically. In two separate samples of ethnically diverse college students comprised largely of East and Southeast Asian American, followed by Caucasians, Latinos, and other groups (total N = 839, age range 18–25 years), we examined the personality, parenting, and motivational correlates of AE. AE was most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of entitlement and to narcissism. Students who reported more academically entitled attitudes perceived their parents as exerting achievement pressure marked by social comparison with other youth and materially rewarding good grades, scored higher than their peers in achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation, and engaged in more academic dishonesty. AE was not significantly associated with GPA.I don't put a lot of credence in these studies but I thought it was interesting that the problem was at least being investigated. The survey results, below, are interesting.
[Hat Tip: Musings of the Mad Biologist]
Greenberger, E., Lessard, J., Chen, C. and Farruggia, S.P. (2008) Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors. Journal of Youth and Adolescence 37:1193-1204 [Springerlink]
It's interesting that although the claim is of " an increase in entitled attitudes ... ", there's no study of previous levels of entitled attitudes; so in fact, never mind analyzing the phenomenon systematically, it doesn't analyze the phenomenon at all. I imagine this sort of sloppy thinking arises out of the entitled attitude of the authors, and no doubt I should publish a bloviating paper sneering at them to prove it.
ReplyDeleteIt's just another "kids these days! Why, back in my day -- !" claim, the same as has been going on for thirty thousand years. And the kids turn out OK in the end, anyway.
Thankfully they get better as they progress in their studies (or perhaps get weeded out). I've taught both first year and third year Anatomy/physiology and I couldn't believe some of the requests I would get from the freshmen. A good quarter of the class asked if their marks could be bumped up without even giving me a reason why. One student even tried to justify it by saying it was her birthday.
ReplyDeleteYeah, the results of this survey don't surprise me at all, but of course we need some sort of baseline to see if these answers are that much different (in spirit, anyway) than they would have been years ago.
ReplyDeleteAnd yes, the students do get better (in terms of attitude) as they mature.
But, at least in the US, we do have the relatively recent phenomenon of the "helicopter parent" and the idea that kids egos are too tender to ever be able to recover from failure of any sort.
This doesn't mean that the newer generation is somehow inferior to mine; in fact they are superior in many ways.
And, well, the "entitlement" problem is a direct result of the actions of, well, MY generation. :-)
I was going to read the paper and the link Larry provided is wrong. Here is the correct one:
ReplyDeletewww.springerlink.com/index/v7476620587x4u0k.pdf
The Abstract reads "Anecdotal evidence suggests an increase in entitled attitudes and behaviors of youth in school and college settings." And the authors DID NOT attempt to study whether this acecdotal evidence is true or not.
They only asked a question "what kind of measurable traits does the sense of entitlement in students correlate to?"
Their answer is not much to anything but seems to be moderately and negatively correlated with constructs like "Social Commitment" and "Work Orientation".
I guess I have always felt that 'entitlement' is a part of human nature (just like greed, kindness, etc) And the amount of entitled actions we observe is a matter of how much we, as a society, allow such behaviors.
ReplyDeleteI can imagine how upbringing would influence those natural tendencies (like it would kindness) but I think some personalities are just going to feel entitled...and we just have to put them right back in their place (at least so that we don't have to hear their bitchin.)
News about this paper was circulated quickly among my colleagues, many of whom have also reported (anecdotally, of course!) an increasing sense of entitlement among students.
ReplyDeleteI don't know how similar high school policies are in different regions, nor if this is actually true across Ontario, but I've heard from many frustrated high school teachers that the system itself inculcates a sense of entitlement. Teachers have mentioned that they are expected to give marks for effort rather than achievement, and that students are allowed to submit additional assignments to improve grades, late penalties cannot be applied, and consequences for plagiarism are minimal to non-existent. If this is common, then it's no wonder that students come into university with 'entitled attitudes'.
Ironically, one of the major root problems for the phenomenon of raising sense of entitlement (I believe it's real) is the egalitarian phylosophy.
ReplyDeleteWhen everyone is supposed to be equally capable, one student's failings must have some outside causes: teacher is not good enough (or is a sexist/chauvinist/racist), society is not good enough (insert you favorite explanation), parents are not good enough, etc, etc.
Once accepted, this notion triggers a chain reaction that inevitably involves grade inflation and, as a consequence, increasing stimulation of the naturally occuring sense of entitlement.
Thanks for the tip! In my post I should have cited the original article, but I was preparing to give a dept. seminar and wanted to fire off a quick rant... I also agree that you have to take these kinds of studies with a grain of salt.
ReplyDeleteI don't have the experience to judge whether students feel more entitled nowadays than they did in the past. However, I do note that before I entered grad school, I had no idea how common 'bitching' for marks was. I can honestly say that I never did this. Sure, sometimes I was upset about a mark or felt I'd been unfairly graded, but I never walked up to a prof and complained. I guess that's not how I was brought up, and it's completely contrary to how my highschool (in French New-Brunswick) taught us to be.
Friends of mine are lecturing classes now, and they're surprised at how aggressive and insulting the emails they're receiving from students are. Whether or not it's a fact, it takes a lot of gall for a 3rd year undergrad to tell a lecturer (or a prof) that they're 'teaching the class wrong' or that 'they don't know how to teach'. As I've pointed out to many students, when the class average is 70% and they scored a marginal pass, it's not the prof's teaching that's a problem, it's their study habits.
Concerning the topic of pickiness with teachers, in all honesty there are some fairly terrible teaching professors. I'm about half-way through my undergrad degree and I've had three science professors who were utterly useless. The first told great personal (non-science) stories but otherwise simply read off the book-prepared powerpoint presentations which were simple repetitions of what's in the book. The second had an extremely thick accent and again read from publisher-prepared slides, half-intelligibly. His tone of voice made it very clear that he was bored and didn't want to be there.
ReplyDeleteThose were two general chemistry professors and both of their lecture sections emptied fairly rapidly (skipping class) despite the fact that the course had a low curve and required in-class response questions. Were my classmates feeling 'entitled' by not going to utterly useless lectures and quite reasonably calling these people bad teachers? If they were, then it's a reasonable sense of entitlement, as they, the government, or their parents were paying thousands of dollars per quarter for this 'education'.
Since I said there were three, the last is a physics professor who again seemed rather bored to be there and read off of publisher-prepared notes. Despite offering very little during lecture, they managed to get behind, thereby making the next quarter in the physics series a bit more difficult.
And don't get me wrong, these were the worst I've had in my university education and most were much better, but even the 'average' lecturer can fall below reasonable educational standards. Or, in a situation which isn't their fault, entire departments can prescribe unsuccessful teaching methods and grading practices which end up rewarding extra-curricular knowledge and assuming that your professors aren't teaching what they expect you to know.
Finally, I'm not a bitter student. In the classes where I thought grading was unfair (ludicrous curves), I usually did much better than the average. But I know when to appreciate focused efforts to educate on the part of my professors and when to warn others away.
In the week's McClean's Magazine, they released their University rankings. They have an editorial piece and an article about how universities should be focusing more on undergraduate education, and de-emphasize other things like research.
ReplyDeleteIt seems this entitlement idea is coming from places other than just the students. As tuition goes up, and workplaces demand undergraduate education, it seems that universities are expected to become a service industry.