I agree with other posters that it's unfair to complain that the so-called "entitlement generation" is any less hard-working than the ones that came before, because when push comes to shove, when they realize the necessity, they do work just as hard. That isn't to say that there haven't been generational changes, though. This generation, and mine before it, was overpraised by its parents to a degree that rarely happened in previous generations. When I read about people working hard to receive the praise of their parents, and feeling proud when praised by a teacher, I can't relate at all. It sounds as old-fashioned as mending clothes or having three channels on TV. Since when was praise a scarce, valued commodity? My generation (born in the late seventies) lived in praise like fish live in water. We don't feel it at all, but we feel its absence, keenly.

Also perhaps starting in my generation (though I missed it) and reaching its peak in the generation now coming to adulthood, was the phenomenon of training children to negotiate with their superiors. Parents train their children that they can always get a little more by asking for it. Argumentation, charm, and manipulation are implicitly encouraged. As a result, kids who have expectations laid down by a boss and teacher count on being able to move those expectations simply by asking. When a professor sticks to the grading standard described on the syllabus, many students are honestly shocked and bewildered. They come in, show their distress, plead, negotiate, and get... nothing? You always get something when you ask for it. To people who haven't been brought up that way, that attitude surely sounds like entitlement, and indeed a student behaving that way decades ago would have been branded "spoiled" and mocked among the teachers, but now it is regarded as a socially normal behavior that can't be held against the individual student.

These are two of the new characteristics by which the "entitlement generation" is recognized. I blame these things on the parents, not on the children, and I think they are both regressions, in the sense that they make our culture less pleasant and less efficient. We have entirely lost the value of praise and at the same time obliged ourselves to produce and consume it incessantly. Negotiation is an expenditure of time and energy, and it is wasteful for a professor, or a manager, to entertain a parade of underlings wheedling for exceptions to policy, and to penalize people who spend their time working instead of honing their appeals, when instead everyone might be doing useful work under a policy that is fairly and uniformly applied.

So, I think the "entitlement generation" is accurately diagnosed, though not justly blamed. Their sense of entitlement is just an illusion that their parents programmed into them, an ultimately cruel one, designed to help them "get theirs" in a world of easy growth and riches. It reflects their parents' view of the world as a place where wealth increases inexorably and is handed out most freely to the individuals who, via self-regard and self-assertion, contrive to appear to deserve it most. Now they're adjusting to a world their parents did not prepare them for, and they're bound to look a little foolish at times, through no fault of their own.