Why today's students are harder to teach

 The Chronicle of Higher Education has an answer:

... for a confluence of reasons, student attitudes have shifted. For one, what’s considered appropriate for a college professor to say and do in the classroom has changed dramatically, especially around topics of race, gender, and other forms of identity. For another, student deference to their teachers is not nearly as strong as it once was.

Students can be quick to judge a pedagogical choice as harmful, offensive, or superfluous to their education, say some professors, who question if their colleges, which they describe as having adopted a “customer is always right” philosophy, will have their backs if and when the customer is wrong.

In some circumstances, the choices or behavior criticized by students would have been “regarded as benign not very long ago,” said Angus Johnston, a historian of American student-activism who teaches at Hostos Community College of the City University of New York.

While this power shift can be “discombobulating” and “scary” for faculty members, especially older ones, he said, “that does not mean it’s a bad development.”

For example, when I teach the contractual view of marriage to MBA's, it is in a gender-neutral tone. Instead of "I gave him the best years of my life and he traded me in on a younger model," I say: 

If a couple decides to take advantage of economies of specialization, one primarily on a career and one primarily on childcare, the one specializing on childcare can be held up, should the relationship end and they have to re-enter the labor force.  To encourage these kinds of specialized investments in children, the marriage contract is designed to protect victims of hold up.  As the legal penalties for breach of the marriage contract have gotten smaller, we see less of this kind of specialization.  

NOTE:  this is correlation, consistent with evidence supporting the contractual view of marriage, but it could also be that the correlation is spurious, that times have changed, and couples want a more equal division of labor at the same time that the marriage contract has been weakened.