As students begin the year searching for the right classes, a meaningful major and a reliable career path, it is worth asking what the purpose of college is. Some would argue that it is simply a funnel that catches unpolished high school students and gives them the tools necessary to properly contribute to corporate society. But I disagree. College is more than a transactional exchange. It is a formative time when young adults develop their moral standards and broaden their perspectives on the world in order to become better citizens and leaders. And yet, especially as a liberal arts student, no matter how much I learn about corporate corruption, I still feel the need to sacrifice my ethics for a lucrative internship or rare entry-level job. However, while no company is perfect, truly ignoring your moral integrity only leads to psychological distress and the erosion of the personal values that our University is meant to help build. To build a better nation as potential future leaders, students need to take responsibility for the indirect costs of their valid yet short-sighted career choices that trade moral principles for prestige.
There are severe, invisible and personal harms from supporting institutions despite their monetary and reputational incentives. Many high-prestige organizations across the nation often prioritize profit over human well-being, environmental resilience and global stability by manufacturing weapons, pushing dangerous products or ignoring their ever-increasing carbon footprints. According to data from the Ethics & Compliance Initiative, roughly 49 percent of U.S. employees have observed unethical behavior, defined as “behavior that is morally unacceptable to the larger community,” in their organizations. Perhaps the most profound effect of interning for an evil company is the way it alters your personal moral compass. Individuals often have the need to view themselves as moral or righteous, so when they engage in unethical behavior many people will use post-hoc rationalization to invent justifications until their immoral actions become their new “normal.” To reconcile the cognitive dissonance between high moral standards and poor ethics of the employer, employees or interns frequently begin to separate their personal ethics from their professional actions.
This phenomenon can result in dangerous consequences. Sure, college interns may not be committing murder or covering up scandals, but when employees compartmentalize their personal beliefs, there are serious repercussions, both for customers and workers. Studies show that repeatedly engaging in corrupt behavior leaves employees with chronic feelings of guilt, draining psychological resources and impairing moral self-control outside of work. The job experience, prestige or pay students receive from working at morally questionable companies cannot fill the internal void left by sacrificing such deeply held beliefs.
Even more notably, these immoral decisions also have wide-reaching effects on the general public. If every single student makes the small individual choice to contribute to companies’ exploitative behavior for personal incentives, then the immoral practices of many corporations will only continue to grow. Behind every scandal or crooked corporate practice — from high textbook prices students must contend with to a corrupt housing market many post-graduates are struggling with — are thousands of everyday people who contribute to these immoral systems. For example, throughout the late 1990s and 2000s, sales representatives aggressively marketed OxyContin despite their awareness of its exacerbation of the opioid crisis. Investigations later revealed that despite employee concerns about the devastating impact of opioid addiction, they continued to engage in deceptive advertising to meet high sales targets and secure lucrative bonuses. In a similar vein, testing at Ford Motor Company in the 1970s revealed that a design flaw caused the Ford Pinto's fuel tank to rupture easily in rear-end collisions, but employees followed through with the design, deciding that paying out preventable death settlements was cheaper than halting production. These cases reveal how individuals’ everyday moral shortcuts can contribute to large-scale exploitation of the very public that they belong to.
If every student on Grounds threw out their ethical code to blindly chase corporate success like workers in these cases, then the knowledge and tools professors have arduously equipped us with will only worsen suffering in the United States. Indeed, paying rent and putting food on the table are real issues coming out of college, but there is a marked difference between working for necessities and shamelessly pursuing prestige and high end salaries at the expense of one's own moral compass.
Given the uncertainty of our future, it is understandable that many anxious college students might compromise their morals for a well-paying and assured job or internship from a corrupt employer. Indeed, in the meritocracy of college, corporate achievement can feel like the only measure of success. We are constantly bombarded with reminders to desperately apply to more internships and to surrender ourselves in the quest for corporate glory. But success cannot be externally evaluated as a level of wealth or prestige but rather as a personal knowledge of how much one has contributed to building a better society.
Our generation faces perilous threats on the horizon — a deep housing crisis, profound economic inequality, artificial intelligence and climate change — but the solutions require more talented, conscientious individuals like us fixing, not aggravating, these systemic problems. While there is no comprehensive framework for determining where exactly corruption begins, employees know when they are violating ethical principles. Whether it be refusing a lucrative yet immoral job, calling out exploitative behavior within a company or supporting smaller, locally owned businesses, we all have a responsibility, however small, in using the resources our University provides us to create a better world.
Nat Taylor is an opinion columnist who writes about politics for The Cavalier Daily. He can be reached at opinion@cavalierdaily.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are not necessarily those of The Cavalier Daily. Columns represent the views of the author alone.
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