Engineering undergrads are now required to take an ethics course at the university I studied at. Clearly they are all immediately disqualified from STEM hiring.

Engineering undergrads are now required to take an ethics course at the university I studied at. Clearly they are all immediately disqualified from STEM hiring. I think what's actually going on is people in industry just take a dim view of academic liberals, and so use a crypto anti-intellectual argument to rationalize against people with academic backgrounds. Sure, there is a risk that the more one knows, the more they might use knowledge to rationalize. Academics (yes, academics) have pointed out this problem, from knowledge about psychology to knowledge about politics (and probably some dead philosopher has mentioned this issue as well!). But that is a risk and not a disqualification.