Rachel Krantz produced this audio postcard from a meeting of the Ethics Society at the NYU Stern School of Business.

The story aired on Marketplace Morning Report on February 25, 2010.  The piece is part of a three-part Youth Media International series for Marketplace. How has the recession changed the way business school students think about ethics?

My name is Janice Shay and I'm currently the co-president of the Stern Ethics society. I had this marketing internship my freshman year and I was doing the book keeping for them and I saw a lot of the things they were doing, in terms of expenses... I knew it was just the executives of the company just having dinners, but they counted it as a company expense. So I didn't think that was very ethical. But at the same time, I was just a freshman. And I didn't have very much power and I was just an intern.

MEETING SOUNDS: You can give them pressure and say if you don't agree to hear you are going to end up in the unemployment line.

I'm Terence Tabili, I'm a senior here at NYU Stern. I study business management with a specialization in entrepreneurship. On my spare time I run my own company.

MEETING SOUNDS: We can get them in the middle of the room and we can say "a" or "b"? Where do you go?

Terrence: Our company--we actually had a product that we had to deliver to a client but we found out it was defective really late in the process. If we did tell them there's a problem with it, they said that since they were on a tight time schedule that we would suffer a big penalty. I think it was 2000 dollars a day. So in the end we decided to fess up and the company gave us an extension to finish the project, so we weren't charged a penalty and we were able to correct the problem. And when I brought this case to the Stern Ethics society they kinda chose the same thing, though some kids were kind of sketchy about it and said they would hide it.

MEETING SOUNDS: But lulu, did discuss world com. We had choice "a" and "b". What would you choose?

JANICE: With our club, if we're telling them these situations, hopefully they're learning from that and they don't do that in the future. Because they're the future, they're the next generation so in the future they encounter any ethical dilemmas they'll think-- this is what happened with Bernie Madoff, this is what happened with Enron. Hopefully that resonates in their minds when they go out in the workplace.