More than 8,000 academics are gathered at Brock University in St. Catharines, Ont., this week for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, presenting papers on how we live, love, learn and clash. Over the coming days, the National Post will highlight some of the most compelling research. Today, Sarah Boesveld looks at how entitled university students could grow to become entitled — and very unhappy — employees.

University students who complain until they get a better grade and view their professors as employees are on the fast track to becoming dissatisfied and disgruntled once they land a job, suggests new research that links academic entitlement with inflated expectations in the workplace.

Amy Peirone, a phD candidate in sociology who this week will present her research at the Congress of the Social Sciences and Humanities conference in St. Catharines, Ont., surveyed more than 1,000 University of Windsor students, resulting in a research paper called “I Bought my Degree, Now I Want My Job!”

Ms. Peirone had the students answer a 94-item online survey about their own academic experiences, which asked them to agree or disagree with statements such as “It’s OK to make demands on a professor so he makes exceptions for me,” or “the tuition I pay entitles me to a passing grade.”

The tuition I pay entitles me to a passing grade

She found a correlation between students displaying a sense of academic entitlement and those who displayed a sense of entitlement when it comes to their future employment expectations, suggesting the attitude could carry over into the working world.

While the average level of academic entitlement was relatively low — 3.3 on a scale of one to 10 — Ms. Peirone found that graduate students tended to have higher levels of entitlement than undergraduates.

“Some professors we were talking [with] about academic entitlements said parents of graduate students have come to talk to them and complain about their grades,” said Ms. Peirone.

“When you’re in school, you’re sort of in a bubble. You don’t really know what the real world is like. If you’re completely cut off from that, your entitlement beliefs and what you’re used to, it’s not a far stretch in saying it would extend to the employee environment.”

Academic entitlement research is a relatively new field, and no one has studied how it may transfer from university to the workplace until now.

Previous studies show high levels of workplace entitlement are related to lower levels of job and life satisfaction. The entitled-in-the-workplace also tend to be less happy with their pay, less committed to their companies, have more tension with their bosses and more difficulty holding down jobs.

There may be very serious problems for a person with higher than average academic entitlement once they make it to the office — if they get there at all, Ms. Peirone’s findings suggest.

Those who researched and explored future careers tended to have higher levels of workplace entitlement — especially graduate students.

“A lot of graduate students, in my own personal [observations], are coming back for the graduate programs just because they couldn’t get the job with the undergraduate degree,” Ms. Peirone said. “Now we’re not looking at $25,000 worth of debt, you’re looking at 50 plus.” Universities also market their graduate programs as stepping stones to a solid career.

Education and Law students were the exception to this rule, perhaps because they have more exposure to the realities of the job market via co-ops and connections outside of school.

Overall, students have high expectations that their university degrees will amount to a job fairly soon after graduation — expectations that may not jibe with the job market.

When you’re in school, you’re sort of in a bubble. You don’t really know what the real world is like

Arts & Social Sciences students, a faculty with some of the toughest prospects out in the current workforce, made up 47.2% of her study sample.

To the statement “obtaining a post secondary degree ensures I will have a job in my field of study after graduation,” the average response was 4.57 out of 10 — meaning about half of the students strongly felt their degree would fairly easily score them work.

Ms. Peirone believes universities and even future employers should do a better job of conveying the realities of the job market. She recalls one professor telling her a graduate student’s expected pay grade for a job out of school: $80,000.

“That student had no experience,” she said.

Meanwhile, that professor had worked for a decade before making that kind of money.

National Post

• Email: sboesveld@nationalpost.com | Twitter: sarahboesveld