What is professional?

Professionalism among students is apparently declining on college campuses. A recent survey showed that 38.3 percent of 400 professors polled believed less than half of their upper-level students exhibited professionalism. Almost as many reported a decrease in student professionalism over the last five years.

While it is difficult to measure whether professionalism—whatever that term actually means, especially in this era of the rapidly changing workplace—has actually deteriorated among college students, this survey indicates that, at the very least, professors are fairly dissatisfied with student behavior when it comes to characteristics undeniably linked with classroom success. Professors associated good interpersonal skills, focus and attention, dependability and timeliness and a strong work ethic with professionalism.

Why do professors believe these qualities to be on the decline? We look more closely at two of the survey’s cited reasons here.

First, almost 30 percent of disappointed professors cited a heightened sense of entitlement, which was defined as “expecting rewards without putting in the work or effort to merit the awards,” as a cause of declining professionalism.

Students may bristle at accusations of entitlement, but there are important forces at work. Professors’ perception of students as entitled can be linked to the increasing commodification of a college education. In an age of skyrocketing tuition costs, dimming job prospects and rampant pre-professionalism, a college diploma has become a crucial but, some might argue, inflated credential. It does not require a stretch of the imagination to see why students paying $250,000 for their education might feel entitled to higher grades. Perhaps education is becoming increasingly contractual—what does tuition really buy you anyway? Indeed, justifying the “value” of higher education, a comparison of costs and commodities, is a theme for this year’s Academic Council meetings.

Second, more than 75 percent of professors blamed technology for interrupting student focus, a crucial component of professionalism. Professors noticed increased technology-related problems and abuses, including texting in class, poorly written emails and substituting face-to-face conversation with digital communication.

This can again be explained by broader trends. Just as entitlement is connected to the increasing commodification of higher education, inappropriate technology use is connected to changing social norms in a digital age. Technology etiquette is still being defined as technology companies and startups generally are changing opinions about what is acceptable. As before, students are responding to these outside signals, apparently to the dismay of their professors.

We do not have easy solutions to the entitlement or technology issue. We simply note that student and professor expectations, according to this study, are dramatically misaligned. Students believe they are earning their educations fair and square. Professors feel that their students are entitled. Students are adapting to new social norms in a technological age; professors see them as rude and unfocused. In this study, “professionalism” is a code for more complicated disagreements between students and professors. In the long term, it calls for a closer examination of these disagreements. In the short term, it warrants at least increased communication, such as more explicit statements about grading standards and in-class technology use, from exasperated professors.