Ethical Behaviour as a Means to Deliver Quality Outcomes in Higher Education

This paper aims to emphasize the importance of ethical behaviour for delivering quality outcomes from higher education institutions, with a focus set on engineering education. Higher education institutions have the potential to build exceptional innovative specialists through teaching, researching and training. However, they also produce tomorrow's leaders in all industrial fields, but also in research and politics, therefore their integrity and ethical values must be tailored to produce honest, reliable and trustworthy graduates. In an effort to display the current ethical climate within universities, the author of this paper analyses the critical aspects present in the new learning environment. The author also presents original recommendations about fostering the ethical culture of engineering education on three lines of intervention: faculty, academic governance and students. The findings of this paper advocate for a new vision about engineering education which should become a gonfalon of quality in teaching and researching. The findings also refer to the responsible tackling of ethical transgressions and the development of excellence in research which is to be correlated with the core society's values. The recommendations of this paper might be used as an introspection tool by academics in an effort to understand and adapt to the current learning environment. Moreover, the recommendations may be applied as a sustainable package of best practices which might be infused into the engineering education to enhance students' ethical literacy and ultimately improve the students' work ethics which is to be further used as future graduates, professionals and leaders.