Entitled Students Are Ruining Higher Education | From the Bell Tower

The past few months have seen a torrent of angry writing from faculty who are fed up with spoiled, entitled students. Here's a solution those faculty won't like.

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Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA Jun 29, 2011

Steven Bell, Library Journal Academic Newswire columnist

How do you define an entitled student? Let me try. I started out in academic librarianship as a reference librarian at the Lippincott Library at the University of Pennsylvania. That just happens to be the library that serves the students at the Wharton School of Business. The typical Wharton MBA student comes from Wall Street or the corporate office, and is paying a considerable sum for the degree—as they are quick to remind you. On more than a few occasions, when asked to provide assistance, perhaps I didn't move fast enough or come up with the exact right response. That's when I'd most likely hear something along the lines of "I pay $50,000 a year to be here. I expect my money's worth from you." For me, that's what defines an entitled student. For them, higher education is not a well-earned privilege but rather a product they buy that makes them a service-demanding customer.

Faculty are fed up
Brian Hall expressed his concern that students were telling him that he wasn't teaching to their style. In expressing his frustration he uses the "e" word: "Maybe students are so used to our consumer-driven society that they have an inaccurate sense of entitlement. They believe the customer is always right... and I am only supposed to teach students what they want to know and nothing more."

Elayne Clift concluded from her semester in hell that "[e]very college teacher I know is bemoaning the same kind of thing. Whether it's rude behavior, lack of intellectual rigor, or both, we are struggling with the same frightening decline in student performance...A sense of entitlement now pervades the academy, excellence be damned."

In the comments these types of essays elicit I sense growing anger among faculty about the degree to which their students are low in their level of preparation and high in their expectations for easy learning and good grades. When confronted with demands for rigor and hard work such students have a "Who do you think is paying for this?" reaction. The extensive comments reflect a faculty that's fed up.

Too few ideas for solutions
We all know that along with underprepared and disengaged students there are many who are passionate about their education. I can certainly understand how entitled students could sour faculty on all that's good about working with the engaged ones. I've had my share of graduate students who mightily tested my patience—but they were always in the minority. What I understand less well is the lack of solutions. Complaints and concerns far outweigh ideas for how to constructively tackle the challenge of entitled students. What could faculty do to shift students from entitled to engaged?

Design the learning experience
Here's my suggestion. Go back to the beginning, and start again by designing a learning experience. What happens in the classroom is inherently an experience, but often it's a series of learning activities that may lack a core theme about what the experience should feel like for the students. If you study the successes of organizations that have succeeded with thoughtful experience design, there is almost always a concept that shapes the experience.

Starbucks is a good example because many people are familiar with the setting. According to Starbucks, its experience is built around the core theme of "living room for the community." Everything that follows is designed to give customers an experience of being in their own living room.

I would like to see more faculty consider such an approach to designing their course, and by design I don't mean putting together a syllabus, readings, and assignments. I mean thinking more intentionally about the learning experience around which the course is designed.

Start with WHY
In a previous column about personal branding I shared some ideas about "the golden circle" framework. The basic idea is to shape new ideas by starting with "why" as in why exactly are you doing what you do. I wonder how many faculty confronting the entitled student problem ask themselves this as they begin designing their courses.

The goal is to clearly communicate the why behind the course. Most students are focused on the what and how, respectively grading and assignments. By focusing first on the why of the course, a faculty member can share with students why he or she believes in the power of the course, why he or she is passionate about the subject, and most importantly why teaching and learning the subject makes a difference.

As the creator of the golden circle framework says "people don't buy what you do, they buy why you do it." True engagement comes from students being intrinsically and emotionally connected to faculty—not from grades.

Here's an example
What would a course based on this principle look like? A good example is provided by Ryan Cordell, who shared his beliefs for why it's important to use technology to engage students, and provided examples and resources for creating this learning experience. If I had to sum up Cordell's philosophy as an experience statement it would be: Students Will Get Their Intellectual Hands Dirty. Cordell's belief, his purpose, is to immerse his students in a scholarly experience. Remember, the students don't buy what we do; they buy why we do it.

What's the library learning experience?
It's less clear to what degree academic librarians share these concerns about entitled students. Those who teach multi-week, credit-based research skill courses—especially if they are required—may see the worst of it. Those who primarily deliver one-shot sessions may occasionally encounter entitled students, but it's merely a minor nuisance.

Even though I may only have one or two meetings with the students, I still want to start things off by letting them know I'm passionate about what I want to share with them, and that I believe that if they will give me their attention and activity, I can turn them into better students.

Could it be us and not them?
In any enterprise, be it a service organization or institution of higher education, there is a tendency, when demanding or rude individuals disrupt the comfort zone, to blame the consequences and outcomes on them. We have "difficult patrons"; surely it's not something we've done. Perhaps what we need to do more often is to step back and re-think how the design of the environment we've created produces or adds to the poor functionality of interactions. It may be that what really needs to change isn't the other person, but how we design the learning process or whatever it is that causes things to fail more often then we'd like. Design or re-design is ultimately about change—taking things from an existing state to a hopefully better one.

Author Information

Steven Bell, Associate University Librarian, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, will be the incoming vice president/president-elect of ACRL. For more from Steven visit his blogs, Kept-Up Academic Librarian, ACRLog and Designing Better Libraries or visit his website.

Reader Comments (13)

Sadly, the link to the example provided by Ryan Cordell doesn't work -- would love to see it!

Posted by M on June 30, 2011 01:25:09PM

M. I just tried the link and it worked fine - but if it fails again here is the direct URL: http://chronicle.com/article/New-Technologies-to-Get- Your/127394/ Enjoy reading. Any other thoughts on what I'm suggesting? Does it strike you as a idea that has some merit or do you see faculty not going along with the idea?

Posted by StevenB on June 30, 2011 04:37:19PM

The shallowness of thought exhibited by instructors here is disheartening. Suppose you have a student (me, for instance) who enters a course with a sense of entitlement to a challenging, constructive educational experience. In a sense, a student both entitled and engaged. Would (Should?) an instructor object? Surely not. [This is, by the way, a justified attitude. With the aggressive expansion of higher education in the US, standards may be falling for students, but they're surely also falling for instructors. No one seems to want to acknowledge this.] The objectionable behavior, then, is not a sense of entitlement per se, but the sense that one is entitled to a certain kind of educational experience: namely, an easy and purely instrumental one ("just give me my walking papers"). For many, even in elite schools and the social strata that feed them, college may be a necessary condition for social mobility (if not also a necessary evil), but it's intrinsically pointless. The surest way to change the behavior to which you object is then to change this norm—that is, the common notion that we should value education only in narrowly instrumental terms. It seems to me that if more students valued their education for its intrinsic worth (or, if that seems empty, for its enlightenedly instrumental worth), they would not demand it be both easy and rewarding. That may seem pie-in-the-sky, but norms can be nudged if you push them aggressively enough.

Posted by Vic on June 30, 2011 05:12:02PM

Even better would be to make explicit exactly what it is that students' tuition dollars entitles them to (and it surely, contra the general tenor of instructors' comments, entitles them to *something*): access. I'm not paying to "be educated" or to "be taught"—as a student, my job is to learn, and that largely means teaching myself. What I do get for my money is a certain amount of access to my instructors—in the form of lectures, office hours, and receptiveness to fair questions. Instructors would do well to explain this to any students whose expectations are otherwise.

Posted by Vic on June 30, 2011 05:25:57PM

How many courses at $3K featuring powerpoint slides narrated by a teacher passing for a lecture do I have to put up with? Nevermind, that the slides were obviously cut and pasted from another source, often without attribution. Try overhearing a well-fed, well-rested and well- dressed professor/advisor happily discussing their comfortable retirement plan with great health care, while I look forward to decades of student loan repayment, then talk to me about entitlement. Of course, not every professor has this attitude, but the message on campus seems to be, don't buck the system, don't ask why satellite campuses are as expensive as the main campus, without libraries (professors recommend Borders instead). I've been a student in my 20s and my 40s and the worm has turned. Tuition is skyrocketing, while content isn't. Most professors don't grasp how different life is for students today, nor do they wish to. Not all, but too many. This is why students are so angry and reactionary. If any other professional provided subpar service, you can switch (usually), but not at a school. You're stuck with the professor and the administration for years, and if it's bad, there's nothing you can do. Smile and pay and pay and pay. And we wonder why we're no longer a world power? Because free education from the GI bill made this country the superpower it was. Now education is just another corporate pig at the trough--albeit "non-profit," they're all in the real estate development game. Maybe when the student loan bubble bursts the schools will experience the same shattering reality the rest of are as people lose jobs and administrators get put out to pasture. Of course, they'll probably ask for a bail out and as a tax payer I'll foot it, though I can't deduct more than $2500 of student loan interest in a year because I make too much. Bail out banks, and insurance companies, why not schools?

Posted by Your Golden Circle is an Anus on June 30, 2011 07:44:55PM

I think a major part of why students seem to feel more entitled is less about the fact that they are paying for the education and more about the fact that they are paying so much for the education. I mean, while a dollar in 1977 would buy me just under four dollars now, higher education costs are almost ten times what they were in 1977. Everything is about the bottom line and the vibe I get is that colleges care more about taking money than preparing the best students to succeed. I'm not saying that colleges, and by colleges, I think I mean college administration, don't care about the students but that they are so focused on the bottom line that they are losing sight of the real point of a university: to be an institution of learning. And I think this is paralleled with society in general. Our current society is so focused on the bottom line that actually making society better is a secondary goal. "We have to balance the budget" is more important than "let's do something to improve living conditions." So I think that students have become conditioned to see everything as a financial endeavor. Our society says that you go to college to get a better (read: higher-paying) job than if didn't go to college. Furthering humanity through learning and exploration and art isn't the zeitgeist of our times; it's to get rich. And then you add the fact that around 3/4 of full-time college students are employed and work on average almost 30 hours a week. But students are told constantly that the amount of work being in college should entail is the equivalent of a full-time job, specifically that we should study two hours for every hour we are in class. Those two statements don't work together. When a student has to work almost a full-time job in order to pay to go to class, they do feel entitled to it. We've set up our students to believe you don't earn the ability to go to college through study, you earn the ability to go to college through working at a different job. The requirement is money instead of knowledge and ability. And so we can talk and talk about how students should see the intrinsic value of their education, but until we get around the fact that the majority of students are putting as much time each week in working to get money to pay just to go to class and eat as they are supposed to be studying and going to class, I just don't think that's going to happen.

Posted by Jake on June 30, 2011 09:10:42PM

Shame on you Mr. Bell. I have been working at the Lippincott Library for over ten years among the most dedicated staff I've ever had the pleasure to work with, and I have never heard a word from a librarian expressing any distaste for a student. I have never encountered a rude Wharton MBA student. I have only encountered curious young minds who are grateful for all of our efforts. Like it or not, libraries provide customer service. That's what we do. That is our purpose. I may not have all the degrees that you have, but I do know what customer service is. When you provide it correctly, there are no bad customers.

Posted by maryanne on July 1, 2011 11:27:36AM

Shame on you Mr. Bell. I have had the pleasure of working at the Lippincott Library for over ten years with the most engaging and dedicated staff and have never encountered a rude MBA or Undergraduate Wharton student. I have never heard any of our staff claim to have a rude student. I have only had the pleasure of meeting young curious minds who are grateful for the services we provide. I may not have the degrees that you do, but I do know that,like it or not, libraries are in the customer service business. That's what we do. That's who we are. When you provide good customer service there are no bad customers.

Posted by maryanne on July 1, 2011 11:38:07AM

Maryann. I think you are reading negativity into my column that isn't there. Read the column again. Do I write anything that suggests my "distaste" for the student? Did I say the student was rude? Did I say that I dislike Wharton students or that their aren't plenty of them who would never act entitled? Did I call the student a "bad customer?" Of course not. That's what you are reading into it, based on your own misperceptions about the column's content. What I did was to use this as an example of an entitled student. I then go on to say that it is the faculty who have a problem with the entitled students - when in fact it is often the faculty who have the problem - not the students. The truth is that on quite a few occasions I did in fact have Wharton students say this to me - no getting around that. When they did it had no impact on the quality of the service I delivered. It is disappointing for you to make a statement along the lines of "I may not have all the degrees you have" since it suggests that my hard years of schooling have taught me nothing - and that it is you, not me, who really understands customer service. I do not appreciate the condescending tone that suggests I don't have an understanding that libraries are all about customer service. Please read my column again. You will see that the whole point of it is to improve the quality of faculty-student relationships through the delivery of a better learning experience - which is a form of unique customer service.

Posted by StevenB on July 1, 2011 08:09:41PM

I am a graduate student. I really do agree that students are entitled. I find it difficult to do group projects when at least one student in the group never does any work and looks to the rest of the group to do it for them. I would love to see higher education go back to the days when a student could fail out. That would solve a lot of problems I think. However when a state school is charging 60k plus for a graduate degree something is wrong as well. It's hard to pay 120k a for a masters at a private school and not act privileged. Ultimately it is up to the teachers to hold students to a higher standard. If that means failing people out who do not work, then that is what needs to happen. It does complicate things when your school is charging 140k for an MBA.

Posted by Mike on July 2, 2011 06:12:19PM

As a college professor in his 50s, I don't think, first of all, that such entitlement solely comes from a sense of paying for something and thus being entitled to have it in some acceptable form. I think that's an excuse that under prepared and under motivated college students use to avoid their facing a paucity of ability and drive to accomplish what's needed. After all, they have been fed a line of nonsense for 12 years prior to entering college: 'it's not what you know nor your accomplishments nor a proper mindset that make you special, rather it's simply being 'you'’. As to the idea of starting out with the 'why' of a course, I agree, but sadly I think this would work better with Wharton grad students than with the legions of college undergrads who have not been inculcated to appreciate basic issues like hard work, the right attitude, earning something and the joy that that brings, and an unwavering respect for others and self. I do agree that standards of instructors have fallen, but this is inevitable given the increasingly lack luster population from which these teachers are drawn (what goes around comes around). In essence, I feel we must go back to root of the problem, the k-12 system. Few disagree that this is where the fundamentals need to be taught, and few disagree that this system is failing on a massive scale. Finally, I agree that colleges have become defacto businesses and have over the last 40 years come to value cost cutting and profit far more than knowledge. Despite the very definition of 'university', these institutions have become soulless factories that increasingly fail to serve properly both students and faculty. But, as long as the US public do not demand things to change then of course they will not change. On the other hand, this will be like trying to take the Big Mac out of the hands of someone who has eaten one every day for 12 years for lunch in school; it won’t be easy.

Posted by arty963 on February 12, 2012 03:41:09AM

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