Power, Privilege, and Entitlement

Chapter 1, Power, Privilege, and Entitlement, situates entitlement among related terms that help explain inequality, such as power and privilege. This chapter defines entitlement and details the way entitlement is measured. Experiments that assess entitlement find reliable differences in women’s and men’s sense of entitlement. Men tend to have an inflated sense of entitlement relative to women. White individuals tend to have a higher sense of entitlement compared to people of color. In addition to entitlement to pay, research on academic entitlement is examined as well. Academically entitled students hold attitudes toward learning and teachers that they should receive more from their academic experience than they put in; that professors should bend rules for them; that they should not have to work as hard as others. Academic entitlement is correlated with academic disengagement, cheating, and classroom incivility.

Pathways From Intimate Partner Violence to Academic Disengagement Among Women University Students

More knowledge is needed related to collegiate intimate partner violence (IPV) and the pathways between experiencing physical and psychological IPV and academic disengagement. Students in a University System in the southwest completed an online survey including measures of physical and psychological IPV, academic disengagement, sense of community, and safety on campus. Conditional process analyses were used to understand key pathways for 6,818 woman identified students. All models found a significant indirect path between physical and psychological IPV and academic disengagement via depression symptoms. Students' sense of community on campus was associated with less academic disengagement regardless of physical violence. The impact of psychological IPV on disengagement was stronger for those with lower senses of community. Enhancing screening and education, providing effective mental health counseling, and increasing advocacy will help institutions better address IPV.

Can Identity Conflicts Impede the Success of Ethnic Minority Students? Consequences of Discrepancies Between Ethnic and Ideal Selves

Because of stigma and underrepresentation, many ethnic minority students may find it difficult to align their ethnicities with their ideal selves. However, these difficulties and their potential consequences have been empirically neglected. To inform this gap in the literature, we propose that the novel concept of ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies (i.e., perceived mismatches between who a person aspires to be and this person’s conception of their ethnic self) is associated with the academic outcomes of ethnic minority students. As hypothesized, large ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies predict high academic disengagement, according to cross-sectional data from Study 1 ( n = 147) and Study 2 ( n = 105), as well as high academic disengagement 2 months later according to half-longitudinal data from Study 2 ( n = 78). In Study 3 ( n = 99), ethnic minority students experimentally induced to perceive high ethnic/ideal self-discrepancies reported significantly higher academic disengagement than ethnic minority students in a low discrepancy condition.