First-Year Students Lazy

The results of a province-wide survey of university profs have just been released, and the news is that more than 55% of faculty surveyed feel that first-year students are a bunch of poorly prepared slackers who want maximum marks for minimum effort.
James Côté is a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario who says that the survey confirms recent research. Says Côté, "It's a wider societal issue, where leisure is very much valued and work habits are not necessarily reinforced in the way that they were in the past. The work ethic is not what it used to be ... no pain, no gain doesn't seem to be prevalent any more."
This all comes as no surprise to me at all. As a teacher in the intermediate grades, I banged my head against this brick wall so often, I finally walked away from it all. I had principals who gave me a hard time for wanting to mark students accurately. More than one who had done dick-all in some subject and should by rights have ended up owing marks, never mind simply failing, was given a pass because I wasn't allowed to tell the truth on their report cards. The principal would admonish me for "discouraging" the up-and-coming idiot and insist I give them a pass because they knew how to spell their name correctly, or some other lame excuse for falsifying marks. Côté is right to say that it is all a wider societal issue. Parents expect their kids to be given an unending stream of A-plus results simply for handing in plagiarized, not necessarily relevant blather from Wikipedia when they "do a project". Unfortunately, there are too many teachers who are right there on the same page with them. I remember years ago sitting in a school staff room, marking some papers. Another teacher sitting there was watching me and after a few moments, felt obliged to show me the error of my ways. She told me I was making unnecessary work for myself by actually reading every word each student wrote, and by marking the papers for details like spelling and grammar. Her advice was to read the first paragraph and see if it was "sort of on topic". If it was, said she, I should then give it an A, and go on to the next. That way, according to her, I would be done in a fraction of the time I was making my self spend needlessly on the marking. Neither was that the only time I listened to such comments from colleagues.
I'm not quite sure how we're supposed to fix this problem of students poorly prepared for university, but I do know we can expect it to worsen before it improves.