Cost-of-Ethics Crisis: Beliefs, Decisions, and Justifications in the Job Searches of Computer Science Students in Canada and the United States

Synthesis: This study examines the disconnect between ethics education and real-world decision-making among 129 computer science students and recent graduates during their job searches. Despite receiving contemporary CS ethics education, most students prioritize compensation, location, and workplace culture over ethical and social concerns when choosing employers. Even when expressing ethical concerns, respondents justified taking contradictory actions through shared explanations: desire to make money or perceived inability to avoid unethical workplaces. This highlights a critical gap in how CS ethics education translates to actual behavioral change. The findings have significant implications for AI safety in education: teaching ethical reasoning about autonomous systems without connecting to students' material circumstances may be insufficient. This connects to broader debates about Pedagogical Safety in Educational Reinforcement Learning, Teacher AI Competency, and Equity in shaping student values.

Connections to AIED

The ethics education gap identified here suggests that AI literacy curricula face a similar risk: students may understand AI ethics principles theoretically while still choosing to use AI tools unethically in practice. This mirrors findings on Academic Integrity and Over-Reliance patterns in student AI use.

What this means for practice

• Faculty developers. Move ethics instruction from principle to job-search rehearsal. With ethical concerns ranked last of seven considerations (average rank 5.01) and remuneration first (2.31), awareness clearly does not carry into decisions — run CS students through realistic employer dilemmas, including the ones they will actually face while applying, and have them articulate a response before the pressure is real.
• Instructors. Surface the rationalization patterns explicitly. Respondents justified contradictions through a shared set of strategies — economic pressure, role/proximity distancing, and prestige — so treat those as teachable moves students can learn to recognize in their own reasoning rather than as individual moral failures.
• Faculty developers. Do not assume your program is the exception. Every respondent came from an accredited school that taught ethics in some capacity, standalone courses or embedded modules included, and the awareness-to-action gap persisted anyway.
• Administrators. Pair ethics curricula with career-services support. Sixty-five percent of respondents applied to at least one Big Tech company, and financial insecurity or the absence of alternatives was a recurring justification, so material circumstances — not just AI literacy content — shape whether ethical commitments survive the job search.

Limitations

• The sample is 129 complete and partial survey responses, drawn from CS students and recent graduates in Canada and the United States recruited through department emails and university subreddits; the authors state it is too small to be representative of the target demographic.
• Nonresponse bias is acknowledged: students who complete surveys without participatory incentives tend to be more socially engaged, so the sample likely over-represents those already attentive to ethical issues.
• Sub-group findings (by gender, ethnicity, or school) come from categories combined for sample-size reasons and are described by the authors as suggestive and exploratory rather than robust; ethnicity analysis was limited to White and Asian respondents.
• Concern levels and justifications are self-reported, and respondents regularly underestimated how many of their peers shared their ethical concerns, which the authors flag as a limitation on any claim about actual workplace behavior.

Citation

Abdalla, M., Abdalla, S., Cappello, A., Dowling, K., Metaxa, D., Widder, D. G., & Stinson, C. (2026). Cost-of-ethics crisis: Beliefs, decisions, and justifications in the job searches of computer science students in Canada and the United States.