Idea of something that undergraduate colleges could do, to encourage reflection about ethics in careers:

Annually poll all the students, to get rankings of how the ethics of well-known companies/brands are perceived by the students.

Then publish the results to students, in a timely fashion, before they're deciding job offers and internships.

I speculate that effects of this could include:

1. Good hiring candidates modifying what offers they pursue and accept -- influenced by awareness, self-reflection, and/or peer-pressure.

2. Students thinking and talking about ethics, when they didn't before. Then some of them carry this influence with them, as part of their character and intellect, going forward (like is one of the ideals of college education).

Also, maybe the second year of the poll, the sentiments are better-informed, because a lot more people have started paying more attention to the question of ethics of a company.

The perception breakdowns by college major would also be interesting, but maybe don't publish those, to reduce internal incentives to game the results. (Everyone knows some majors tend a bit more towards sociopathic than others, but some would rather that not be officials.)

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taormina 2 hours ago | parent [-]

They already have ethics classes in college. The unethical already don’t care. Students already do basic research but when the market is so shit, do you really expect them to permanently hamstring their careers by torpedoing their only offer? Especially given that as a fresh college grad, it’s not like anyone cares about your opinion anyways. So let’s guilt the vaguely ethical ones into never getting involved and leaving all the sociopaths to run the show. This is an idea destined for success.

	▲	neilv 21 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Ethics classes (and certifications/trainings, like for doing human subjects research) are another thing that students are incentivized and conditioned to cheat on, rather than to reflect upon. I'm talking about a poll that raises awareness across the entire student population, in a low-cost way, with no incentive to cheat nor to do anything other than give honest answers. Regarding whether awareness of ethics would penalize those with any ethical tendency: We can already see the last 2 decades of rampant unethical behavior throughout tech companies. Virtually every tech company knowingly sells out its users to data brokers, for example. Sociopaths already dominate, and have conditioned everyone below them to behave in an at least compliant way even when doing something unethical. It's too bad we're starting late on that absolutely pervasive ethics problem, but we can't make the problem any worse by trying an education intervention now. And it's the traditional job of colleges to do this -- not to pump out oblivious worker drones.