Academic entitlement tracks with poorer student well-being through impostor feelings
In a cohort of 864 undergraduate students from Al-Azhar University and Kafr El-Sheikh University in Egypt, academic entitlement was tied to worse student well-being both directly and through a measurable rise in the impostor phenomenon. The pattern is psychologically coherent: when students expect special academic treatment or outcomes without corresponding effort, the mismatch can intensify self-doubt rather than confidence. In practice, the mindset may create a split between outward demands and inward fragility.
The study used a cross-sectional correlational design and measured three domains with established instruments: the Academic Entitlement Scale (AES-28), the Short Clance Impostor Phenomenon Scale (CIPS-10), and the BBC Well-Being Scale (BBC-WBS). Mediation analysis was performed with the PROCESS macro and bootstrapping based on 5,000 resamples. The statistical model showed that academic entitlement significantly and positively predicted impostor feelings, while impostor feelings significantly and negatively predicted well-being. The mediation was partial, accounting for about 23% of the total effect.
A single psychological mechanism linked two apparently different academic attitudes.
How entitlement becomes self-doubt in the university setting
Academic entitlement refers to expectations of high grades and special rewards regardless of actual effort or performance. In a university environment, that stance can distort the student-teacher relationship, encourage grade negotiation, and weaken the normal feedback loop between preparation and outcome. When performance does not match expectation, the internal response may not be calm recalibration. It may be a sharper sense of fraudulence, the hallmark of the impostor phenomenon.
That tension matters because impostor feelings are not merely about modesty or caution. They involve a persistent belief that achievements are undeserved and that exposure as incompetent is inevitable, even in the presence of objective success. For students already inclined to believe that favorable outcomes should come easily, the pressure to maintain that self-image can intensify internal conflict. The result is not always complacency. It can be anxiety, overmonitoring of performance, and a fragile sense of competence that erodes daily well-being.
The authors framed this relationship through a student-adapted Job Demands-Resources model enriched by self-concept incongruence theory. In that frame, entitlement-driven expectations function as demands, while impostor cognitions reflect the internal depletion that follows when outward self-appraisal and inward self-experience do not align. The mechanism is clinically plausible even outside a psychiatric setting. A student who feels entitled to success but cannot fully own achievement may remain trapped in a cycle of self-criticism and unstable self-worth.
Why the impostor phenomenon matters for campus mental health
The study’s results place the impostor phenomenon at the center of the entitlement-well-being link. That is important because universities often respond to academic distress by focusing on workload, grades, or time management alone. Those factors matter, but they do not fully capture the internal narrative students bring to academic life. A student may appear assertive on the outside and yet be psychologically vulnerable to failure, exposure, or chronic dissatisfaction with their own performance.
Well-being in this research was treated as a composite score rather than separate psychological, physical, and relational subdomains. Mediation was not tested separately for those dimensions, so the findings speak to overall well-being rather than to each component in isolation. Even so, the direction of the association is clear: higher entitlement was associated with poorer well-being, and impostor feelings explained a meaningful portion of that relationship.
For campus counseling services, the finding points to two targets rather than one. Students who show entitlement-related behaviors may benefit from interventions that challenge unrealistic assumptions about academic reward. Students who struggle with impostor feelings may need help reattributing success to effort, ability, and learning rather than luck or deception. When those problems coexist, the emotional burden can be greater than either alone.
An Egyptian undergraduate sample, with relevance beyond one campus
Participants were recruited from two Egyptian universities, making the findings especially relevant to settings where family expectations, social comparison, and collectivist values shape academic identity. The paper specifically notes that universities in comparable Egyptian and collectivist contexts may want to address both entitled academic attitudes and impostor-related cognitions through counseling and pedagogical strategies. That recommendation is narrow and practical: it does not call for a wholesale redesign of higher education, but for attention to the beliefs students carry into classrooms, offices, and exam halls.
The public data repository strengthens the transparency of the work. All relevant data were made available in a public Zenodo repository, and the dataset was described as fully anonymized with no personally identifying information. Funding came from Prince Sattam bin Abdulaziz University, and no competing interests were declared.
A cross-sectional design cannot establish causality, and the findings do not prove that entitlement causes impostor feelings or that impostor feelings alone reduce well-being. The relationship may also run in the opposite direction in some students, or reflect shared influences not captured here. Still, the observed mediation is clinically and educationally meaningful because it identifies a psychological pathway that universities can actually address.
One limitation remains specific and important: mediation was not tested separately for psychological, physical, and relational well-being. Future work will need to determine whether the same pathway holds across those domains, or whether entitlement and impostorism affect them in different ways. For now, the message from this study is straightforward. In this undergraduate sample, academic entitlement was not an isolated attitude; it was linked to lower well-being through a deeper and more corrosive sense of fraudulence.