Industrial engineering students explore how to do the right thing when money matters

A video plays on the projector screens of a lecture hall in the Mechanical Engineering Building on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus, telling undergraduate students in Industrial and Systems Engineering 313: Engineering Economic Analysis the tragic tale of the Ford Pinto.

The students—with a little probing from Industrial and Systems Engineering Professor Laura Albert—then spend the next half hour or so debating some of the ethical questions entangled in the story of the ill-fated 1970s car. Its fuel tank, positioned in the back of the car like other subcompact cars of that era, made it susceptible to fires, even in low-speed crashes. Ford’s somewhat ham-handed response, exposed in a juicy if distorted media report, cemented the vehicle’s legacy as a cautionary tale.

One student opines that Ford management bore more responsibility than the company’s engineers, who were following established federal safety standards.

“They’re an American company; they know what American car culture and mobility culture is like,” adds first-year industrial engineering major Mia Santini.

Another student put the onus on the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which sets those safety standards. Albert chimes in throughout, adding context—for example, the Pinto actually ranked behind other comparable models in fatalities per miles driven.

Long a required class for industrial engineering majors at UW-Madison, a revamped version of ISyE 313 now blends engineering ethics and a dash of personal finance with its usual overview of large-scale financial analysis techniques.

“In this course, I tell students the main theme is making big decisions involving money,” says Albert, who took over the course in fall 2024 and continues to make improvements. “I’m hoping they walk away knowing that engineering is about more than just applying the right formula, that there are many situations involving personal responsibility that they need to be aware of, and they feel equipped to handle those situations.”

Students learn financial fundamentals for evaluating investment decisions, such as cost-volume-profit analyses, discounted cash flow methods and capital budgeting. But, Albert concedes, those kinds of large, organizational-level questions can seem far removed from students’ daily lives. Which is why she also infuses personal finance literacy, soliciting topics of interest to students, such as cryptocurrency and retirement planning, and concluding with a final lecture that distills her top 10 pieces of financial advice.

“It relates directly to your life. It can affect your life and how you act,” says Fahad Alshatb, a junior exchange student from Saudi Arabia.

Because ethical dilemmas often involve financial ramifications, Albert wanted to build on a college-wide initiative and integrate a strong engineering ethics focus throughout the course. During the semester, students discuss case studies: the Pinto; the 2023 implosion of the OceanGate Titan submersible vessel; malfunctions in Boeing’s 737 MAX model; and the fraudulent biomedical startup Theranos. (Tyler Shultz, the engineer-turned-whistleblower in the Theranos case, spoke at the college’s Ethics in Engineering Distinguished Seminar in 2021.)

“I think the whole course is very practical for their personal and professional lives, but I really want them to take away the engineering ethics,” says Albert. “If they can practice engineering in an ethical way, they would make me really proud. And life will test that. It’s not just about passing a test. Life will test them.”