Self-Entitled College Students: Contributions of Personality, Parenting, and Motivational Factors

Ellen Greenberger,Jared Lessard,Susan P Farruggia,Chuansheng Chen

doi:10.1007/s10964-008-9284-9

Ellen Greenberger, Jared Lessard + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.1007/s10964-008-9284-9

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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 includes expectations 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 per- sonality, parenting, and motivational correlates of AE. AE was most strongly related to exploitive attitudes towards others and moderately related to an overall sense of enti- tlement and to narcissism. Students who reported more academically entitled attitudes perceived their parents as exerting achievement pressure marked by social compari- son with other youth and materially rewarding good grades, scored higher than their peers in achievement anxiety and extrinsic motivation, and engaged in more academic dis- honesty. AE was not significantly associated with GPA.

Highlights

Anecdotal evidence suggests a substantial rise over recent decades in the number of students who beleaguer their professors for higher grades, forecast dire personal outcomes if they do not get the grades they feel they deserve, and expect professors and teaching assistants to go to exceptional lengths to accommodate their needs and preferences
Among the most highly-endorsed items (66.2%) was the item, ‘‘If I have explained to my professor that I’m trying hard, I think he/ she should give me some consideration with respect to my course grade.’’ Among the second group of items, nearly 25% of students agreed that ‘‘A professor should be willing to lend me his/her course notes if I ask for them.’’ In the third group of items, nearly one in ten respondents endorsed the view, ‘‘A professor should let me arrange to turn in an assignment late if the due date interferes with my vacation plans.’’
Results indicated that academic entitlement’’ (AE) has both meaningful relations to, and important differences from, other personality variables

Summary

Introduction

Anecdotal evidence suggests a substantial rise over recent decades in the number of students who beleaguer their professors for higher grades, forecast dire personal outcomes if they do not get the grades they feel they deserve (or want), and expect professors and teaching assistants to go to exceptional lengths to accommodate their needs and preferences. A search of Lexis/Nexis (2007) reveals that references in the print media to the joint terms ‘‘sense of entitlement’’ and ‘‘students’’ have increased six-fold in the past decade: from 16 in 1996 to 102 in 2006. The phenomenon of entitlement in the academic arena has not yet been examined systematically by researchers. The more general phenomenon of entitlement has attracted substantial amounts of both media and research attention. A recent large-scale empirical study by Trzesniewski et al (2008) reported that a generalized sense of entitlement had increased slightly from 1996 to 2007. Entitlement, or ‘‘the expectation of special privileges over others and special exemptions from normal social demands’’ Entitlement, or ‘‘the expectation of special privileges over others and special exemptions from normal social demands’’ (Raskin and Terry 1988, p. 890), was measured using the entitlement

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