I don't remember being that way...

So, I want you all to remember back (for some it will be way back, for others not so long ago) to when you were a college student. It seems to me the ones I deal with tend to be a little whiny, don't look at their syllabus to find out information and expect me to hand feed them the information for their assignments. Do they not realize that they came to college to learn how to "think and analysis for themselves". I am here to teach them how to be life-long learners, they don't want to go through life like cattle, beliveing everything everybody tells them, do they?
Am I being to cynical? Am I expecting too much? A few days ago I was helping a student who had a realling interesting research topic. They got upset because there were no articles that talked exactly about what they wanted. I explained what they needed to do was look up articles about the two main ideas of their research and then based on what they read, and draw their conslusions from that. I even gave an example of how to do it, the student looked at me like I was CRAZY!!!
So I am sending this question out to the people, what do you expect students to learn in college, or what did you learn?