I think people overdramatize what's right and what's wrong with "kids these days." I teach them (on the undergraduate level, at a state university) and I probably can rough out the basic exteriors of their learning and emotional profile. Here are ten things that apply to a lot of students today.
1. If a thing is theoretical, kids today couldn't be less interested. They want every item in a lecture to be useful in itself, or to explain something else.
2. If a thing is theoretical, it is probably boring, and kids today want every lecture to be entertaining.
3. If they could get a job that pays a lot of money without college, they would. Getting "educated" for its own sake couldn't be of less interest to most of them. For them, college is an investment that pays off with a job, and that's all it is.
4. Nothing we know is of particular interest to them. They are very polite to us, but they don't really care about anything that has happened before. They are uniquely ahistorical.
5. Kids today can't write. At all. Whatsoever. That's hyperbole, of course; but I can certainly say that in the eight years that I've been a full-time professor, I have had perhaps five students that I would call very good to excellent writers. A slightly larger group, perhaps ten, wrote adequately. And everyone else - which is about 300-400 students - wrote wretchedly. They were particularly poor in writing non-fictional essays and reports; they seemed to lack the ability to capture the thread of someone else's thoughts.
6. Kids today cheat. A lot. And much more than we did. I want to be clear that most of them don't, but that an alarming minority do. I also note that it is the greater ease with which cheating can be accomplished today (rather than any ethical disparity in our respective generations) that is probably responsible. 
7. Kids today are far less racist than any generation that has preceded them (I thought I'd add some positive points). The critical threshold in racial relations, in my view, is whether a white person will DATE a person of another race. Not just "be friends," not just "hang out with," but actually date - and consider marrying - a person of another race. And this generation is better at that.
8. Kids hate buying textbooks. With a passion. Some of this animus is deserved; textbooks regularly go out of date, the information is sometimes old by the time the thing is printed, and the bloody things cost an arm and a leg (now $150-200 for ONE textbook). They wonder why I can't make any and all information available online.
9. Kids only want to learn things that they will be tested on. They couldn't care less about anything else. This is because they are simply unconvinced that the majority of what they learn in college cannot be learned by themselves just by googling stuff.
10. Kids today multitask. A lot. They use their cellphones, host radio shows, watch television and hang in groups simultaneously, and no one has a problem with it.