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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.