Academic Entitlement in Higher Education Systems
Summary
Academic entitlement describes students’ belief that they deserve high grades, special treatment or leniency without corresponding effort. It encompasses expectations rooted in consumer‐oriented views of education, shifting faculty–student dynamics and broader socio-cultural influences. Manifestations range from grade haggling and responsibility avoidance to demands for deadline extensions and preferential feedback. Understanding its antecedents, such as parenting styles, institutional policies and individual traits, is crucial for designing interventions that foster equity, academic integrity and constructive engagement across diverse educational settings.
Research from Nature Portfolio
Recent studies have investigated the influence of parental over-protection on entitlement attitudes in nursing cohorts. Using structural equation modelling, researchers demonstrated that an external locus of control and heightened psychological entitlement operate in series to mediate the effect of over-protective upbringing on academic entitlement. These findings highlight the potential of targeting attributional style and maladaptive entitlement beliefs through family-informed support and curriculum interventions to promote realistic expectations and resilience in professional health education.
Academic Entitlement in Higher Education Systems publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in academic entitlement in higher education systems across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Academic entitlement: The expectation of preferential academic treatment or high grades irrespective of effort or performance.
External locus of control: A belief that outcomes are determined by external forces beyond one’s own influence.
Psychological entitlement: A stable personality trait characterised by a belief in one’s inherent right to elevated privileges.
Serial mediation model: A statistical approach to test whether the effect of one variable on another is transmitted through a sequence of mediating variables.
Academic Entitlement Scale: A multi-dimensional measure designed to quantify students’ entitlement attitudes across several facets.
References
- A serial mediation model reveals the association between parental over-protection and academic entitlement among nursing students. Scientific Reports (2024).
- Pharmacy faculty experiences with student academic entitlement: a multinational study from the Arab world. BMC Medical Education (2024).
- I deserve more A’s: A report on the development of a measure of academic entitlement. PLOS ONE (2020).
- Perceived work values, materialism and entitlement mentality among Generation Y students in South Africa. Acta Commercii (2022).
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