Pay-to-play Scandals and Engineers' Code of Ethics

There have never been any documented benefits of corruption in any country more than the overall negative impact on a particular country. Ranging from bribery, embezzlement extortion, pay-to-play, influence peddling, to patronage, and many more, their effect on social, political, economic, education, and other social institutions is unmatched. Most people are always thinking that economic and financial gains are the only things that may lead to people being corrupt; however, as shown in this paper, many factors can lead to corruption. Recently, the media has been exposing pay-to-play scandals in numerous organizations and institutions in society, particularly the admission issue in colleges. For instance, the American higher education system has been grappling with cleaning its name from nationwide pay-to-play scandals, which have seen prominent universities such as Yale, Stanford, Georgetown, USC, and Wake Forest, images tainted. This paper looks at corruption. It attempts to evaluate the impact of corruption on various aspects of the engineering profession with an epidemic that has engulfed both the aspiring and senior civil engineering professionals.

While the American Society of Civil Engineers code of ethics defines corruption as the illegal and dishonest utilization of public resources through public authority to get private advantages, corruption has been a widespread practice in the civil engineering with massive detrimental effects. Actually, it is somehow difficult to define corruption because of the broad concept, although in all the acceptable definitions, there is a link with negativity, especially in religious, economic, social, and educational realms. While many reasons are cited as the cause of corruption, corruption has established links to moral looseness, greed, political motives, poor reward system, poverty, and lack of public participation in public activities, thus low transparency.

Recent Pay-to-Play Scandals

It is quite difficult to know where to begin with the recent big stories in the media on cheating and bribery to gain admission to elite universities. A 10-month-long investigation, branded Operation Varsity Blues exposed massive cases of corruption across America at various levels of the university admissions process. Reputable names in the society have been implicated, including business Mogul and actresses such as Lori Loughlin gave out hundreds of thousands of dollars to get an admission spot for her daughter to the University of Southern California. Besides, there have been reports of parents having to report tales learning disabilities of the children to gain a spot and allow the cheating to take place. Another scandal involved non-athlete kids photoshopped their faces onto the bodies of actual athletes to prove they belonged to the group of applicants that required special consideration. Besides the corruption in higher education, the engineering profession has been hit with major scandals such as the corruption case worth $177.6 million suits related to waterworks construction contracts in New York City. Still, Heinis (2017) reports that a New Jersey company director was involved in pay-to-play scandals with its top executives indicted for conspiring to bribe Philadelphia mayors about $1.8 million for the contract. The corruption mentioned above can be termed as mere schemes of money distribution and are nothing compared to Odebrecht conglomerate scandal. The scandal involved construction firms in Latin American and was in over 27 countries in various engineering-related industries. This is evident that corruption, a universal plague that has eaten into the fabrics on American society, and the whole world has deep roots in the civil engineering profession. In education, the findings from Dimkpa (2011) report that corruption is a prevalent practice in colleges and universities and encompasses students, lecturers, parents, and the administration. This is due to poor university entry requirements by the students, comprised lecturers’ attitude, poor pay of the lecturers, poor background among the students, and poor study habits.

Effects of Corruption on the Civil Engineering Profession

The real impact of higher education corruption on economic growth is still a question to be answered with so many theoretical works and few empirical evidence. However, educational corruption may have a detrimental effect on productivity, which in turn may have a further impact and influence on the national economy structure. According to Dimkpa (2011) research, corruption has a devastating effect on the education system as it leads to university and college graduates with poor quality skills. These graduates were unable to do their university assignments, which subsequently leads to poor performance when employed. Still, corruption leads to poor morals among the students and produces graduates who cannot communicate effectively. Without a robust external and internal quality assurance system, corruption can lead to harmful practices not only to the civil engineering profession but also in other professions such as medicine, which are important in life.

According to the report from TNA Global Consult, the costs of corruption and bribery in the construction industry are distinctively detrimental. From poor procurement practices, contract and investment decisions, corruption and bribery have an impact on the quality of projects undertaken by civil engineers, which results in taking shortcuts and failing to meet the required safety standards. According to the corruption index in the business sector, engineering, construction, and infrastructure sectors have the highest corruption scores. The report from TNA states that this is not new owing to the complex nature of the sector. These industries are characterized by large contracts with huge construction projects that are unique and hard to benchmark due to the additional time and costs. Therefore, it is simple to inflate figures. In addition, these sectors are so fragmented with so many contractors and subcontractors making it hard to track payments and stick to the standard of practice

Furthermore, the effect of corruption and bribery can be associated with the low quality of education and graduates. In the recent past, the media has been keen on covering the high rate of low employability among engineering students. From engineering companies to various researches and engineering veterans, there has been lamentation over the poor quality of engineering graduates. One of the reasons for these results is the admission criteria, which has led to low aptitude students and uninterested engineering cohort who, in the end, become irrelevant to the industry. Therefore, besides the low quality of graduate students, there is a low number of graduates due to a high number of dropouts, which leads to an industry shortage.

Eventually, wrong admission practices lead to wastage of skills while diversion of resources for personal gain could lead to a stressed economy and poor quality of projects. This is a wake-up call to the civil engineering sector to step up and take remedial measures to save the name of the engineering profession. It is time ASCE to have a look at its Code of Ethics states and engage stricter policies to stop the practice. It is the mandate of every engineer whether young or senior to act in such a way to maintain and advance the honor, integrity, and dignity of the engineering profession and this should be through acting with zero-tolerance for bribery, fraud, and corruption.