Age of Entitlement: How Does Physician Assistant Education Change to Accommodate the Generation Y Student?

Abstract

INTRODUCTION A retired dean and academic vice president of 15 years, who had previously taught graduate students, decided to return to academia in 2006. Kenneth Stewart began teaching undergraduate psychology courses and rapidly realized that the students he was teaching were very different from the students he had taught 20 years ago. The current students seemed less prepared and less motivated, frequently challenged instructor decisions about deadlines, and seemed to hold the instructor more accountable for their learning than themselves. In the classroom, the students displayed a short attention span, decreased mental endurance, and less of an ability to understand the feelings of others.1 Interested in what was causing the change in the students, the professor administered the California Psychological Inventory, Revised, to his students. This is a self-reported personality inventory of 434 true/false questions used to self-describe the behavior of individuals. He then compared the results of the students from 1987 to those of his current class of 20 students, ranging in age from 21–24 years old.1 In the inventory, the current students described themselves as possessing lower levels of perseverance, self-sufficiency, selfcontrol, personal awareness of others, and ambition than the previous generations of students. In addition, the students admitted to possessing weak study habits, were insistent in having things go their way, were easily irritable, and were more disrespectful of rules.1 Stewart later realized that his students were irritated because he did not provide the amount of feedback and approval that the students felt they were entitled to receive.1 (However, he also discovered that many students would return and thank him for challenging them and having expectations that other instructors did not have.) Two thoughts come to mind when reading the above paragraphs and relating them to current physician assistant (PA) education. One is that the scenario generally describes many current first-year PA students nationally. Two, how can these students — who possess few qualities of a practicing PA (perseverance, self-sufficiency, and personal awareness of others) — be transformed into good practicing PAs? This generation — variously known as Generation Y, Millennial Generation, Net Generation, Echo-Boomers, Google Generation, or the Nexters — encompasses approximately 90 million individuals born approximately between 1980–2001.2,3 This generation has been defined by shifts in parenting styles as well as by such issues as globalization, 9/11, and governmental mistruths.4