Student Entitlement: Issues and Strategies for Confronting Entitlement in the Classroom and Beyond

Abstract

While not representative of all students, those who demonstrate a sense of entitlement demand a great deal of instructors' time and energy. Our article places student entitlement in its social context, with specific attention to the prevalence of the consumer mentality, grade inflation, and the self-esteem of the student generation. We then outline several strategies for dealing with entitlement behavior. We suggest that greater clarity in standards and assessment, combined with specific requirements guiding teacher-student interactions and general efforts to resocialize students and faculty, will help to curb these behaviors.

Keywords:

• classroom incivilities
• classroom management
• student entitlement

acknowledgment

We wish to thank Leah Janssen and Emily Slominski for helpful research assistance, and Glenn Muschert, the anonymous College Teaching reviewer, and the editor for their valuable comments. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2006 Lilly Conference on College Teaching in Oxford, OH.

Notes

1. Influential work on these topics by Boice (1996) and Kuhlenschmidt and Layne (1999) has been followed up by useful papers by Meyers (2003), Meyers, Bender, Hill, and Thomas (2006) Caboni, Hirschy, and Best (2004), and Bray and Del Favero (2004).