In recent decades, universities have been concerned about the ethical dimension in professional education. This, however, has meant new challenges for institutions in terms of syllabus design, teacher’s training and socialization of those values that underlie the professional activity. In this article, we discuss some of the problems that have been faced by universities when socializing professional values and ethics. Also, we present the partial results of a research focused on graduate students in the UJAT. This is an exploratory and descriptive research and the data we gathered during this process, show us that students are highly interested in learning ethical and affective-emotional competencies. On the other hand, cognitive and technical elements, while important, are placed sometimes in a second position. Finally, we found that there are significant differences between the values and attitudes held by students from different disciplines or fields of study.

Key words: Universities, professional education, ethical instruction, graduate students.