“Academic entitlement refers to . . . when students have the expectation that they deserve preferential treatment or awards and outcomes independent of their input and performance,” said Amy Peirone, a PhD student at the University of Windsor who wrote a study on the relationship between academic and workplace entitlement.
The issue of whether students are “entitled” and “coddled” has been a recent debate among psychologists, educators, and students themselves. Steffie Hawrylak-Young, an instructor at Nova Scotia Community College, spoke out about the issue, saying she thinks students are becoming increasingly entitled.
Hawrylak-Young said her students “asked for special favours without justification, like extensions on papers . . . because they are accustomed to handing in assignments late in high school.”
She said she thinks post-secondary educators are left dealing with students struggling to transition from high school to university, and high school educators need to start making students aware of academic-related consequences.
What Happened to Learning?
Andrea Howard, a Carleton psychology professor, said she thinks the current education system’s emphasis on test scores and high grades contributes to a growing sense of entitlement among students.
“If we care less about mastery and care more just about achieving benchmarks, then it’s hard for students to approach learning any subject with the goal of wanting to be an expert in that subject. So, we train students from a pretty early age now to care about their grades, and to not care about whether they are learning material,” she said.
Andrew Flores, a second-year Carleton computer science student, said he thinks many students feel entitled to high grades because their future careers depend on them.
“I was studying neuroscience before this and a lot of these students wanted to go to medical school or graduate school,” Flores said. “If you want a career that requires a graduate degree, then that’s a lot of pressure and you’ll do whatever it takes to be able to continue your career.”
Mohab Abdelleader, a second-year Carleton computer science student, said he thinks academic entitlement comes from the mentality of only studying a subject area for its job prospects.
“When you don’t want to [learn], you’re both unmotivated to do any of the work and you’re also almost pissed that you have to do it, which is probably where a lot of the entitlement comes from,” he said. “When people are in school for the job . . . they’re only seeing the end goal.”
Flores added he thinks it is easy for students to get As on exams even if they don’t understand the course’s concepts.
“I would memorize these drug names without even knowing what they did,” Flores said. “I had an exam last week . . . where I didn’t really understand the content, but I looked at the past midterms a few minutes before the exam and when I went to take the midterm, I found that they were the exact same questions—just with different numbers.”
John Warner, an English instructor at the College of Charleston, said in an email that while the education system causes students to value their grades, the problem with inflating grades is it separates grades and learning.
“Saying students are ‘entitled’ because they aren’t as interested in ‘learning’ assumes that grades and learning are inextricably linked. They aren’t,” Warner said.
Howard said he thinks the focus on grades means professors mostly receive questions from students about how to increase their grades, rather than questions about the learning material.
“I have lots of students asking for assignments not to be counted, or for weights of grades to be changed, or opportunities for extra credit. [I] get a lot of those requests and it’s hard to see how any one individual should be granted the special circumstances,” Howard said.
Rachel Anderson, a first-year humanities student at McMaster University, said in a Facebook message it was hard for her to take criticism from her TAs at first, especially when she thought she should have received a higher grade. But, she said she learned to use the feedback and talk to her TAs to improve on the next assignment.
“I recently did very poorly on one of my midterms, so yes, I did have a bit of a freak-out,” Anderson said. “But once I got over that, I decided that I need[ed] to go right to the student success centre and [to] my professor to go over what I did wrong and how to study better for the exam.”
A Sense of Future Workplace Entitlement
Due to credential inflation in the job market, Howard said university degrees have become stepping stones to a career, which influences how students approach their studies.
The results of Peirone’s study showed that academic entitlement is actually predictive of higher levels of prospective workplace entitlement, which is the “unrealistic beliefs or expectations that one deserves awards or outcomes regardless of their performance in the actual workplace,” she said.
According to Peirone, the study suggests educating students on the realities of their future employment situation would help create clear expectations in students’ minds, and would likely be a positive influence on academics.
“So if students in education and law are more likely to participate in work placements or actually seek out information about the prospective workplace, then they might have more realistic expectations, which might result in the lower levels of entitlement,” Peirone said.
Howard said she understands why students may seem aggressive in their expectations because of the difficulty graduates have finding jobs.
“Millennials have the poorest employment outlook of basically any generation in the last hundred years, with the exception of the Depression, and are facing a labour market that has an incredible amount of instability,” Howard said. “There aren’t nearly as many positions available—it’s a lot of contract, a lot of contingent work. So the idea that people facing that kind of outlook after university are ‘entitled’ is a little bit hard to swallow.”
High Employment Demands
University graduates’ demands for high salaries and promotions are a response to society placing value on these career elements, according to Warner.
“We’ve created a culture that says promotion and salary are what’s most meaningful. We shouldn’t expect people to want something other than what we say they should,” he said.
Warner said he thinks students are too worried about money and high grades to focus on their learning.
“I think the increased cost of tuition has increased the anxiety associated with getting an education. The stakes are higher, particularly if they’re taking out loans, or working nearly full-time to pay for school,” he said.
Howard also said the assertiveness of students doesn’t necessarily equate to a sense of academic entitlement.
“It’s not unreasonable if you’re living in Toronto or Vancouver and the average cost of a single-family, detached home is close to a million dollars, that you want to make fifty or sixty thousand a year right off the bat,” Howard said. “If you go into a job asking for a salary that you think is fair, I don’t see any harm in you asking for what you think you deserve. It might be really unrealistic, but just the fact that you think you should be earning an amount of money that is enough to sustain a reasonable quality of life, doesn’t to me say ‘entitled,’ it says ‘I don’t want to live below the poverty line.’”
But whether or not millennials are academically entitled is still up for debate.
“It’s a well-ingrained popular opinion that young people in their early 20s have this entitled attitude toward everything,” Howard said. “And that is completely unfair, but I don’t think it’s new. I think we have literally been saying that about people in their early 20s with different language for decades.”
