Education agency discriminated against even more ethnically diverse students: new study

A new independent study into discrimination against ethnically diverse students by DUO during fraud controls found that the education agency’s biases affected even more students than showed in the first investigation. A massive 86 percent of students who filed a complaint about these fraud checks had a nationality other than Dutch-only, the education agency said on Wednesday.

In March, Minister Robbert Dijkgraaf of Education informed parliament that ethnically diverse students were very overrepresented in DUO’s fraud checks on its student grants for students living away from home. A PricewaterhouseCoopers study came to this conclusion. He apologized on behalf of the Cabinet and announced a follow-up investigation.

Algorithm Audit did the follow-up study. It linked data from Statistics Netherlands (CBS) about students’ backgrounds with DUO data about students receiving a grant for not living with their parents and the fraud checks done on those grants.

It found that students with a non-European background are very overrepresented in all steps of the fraud control process. “The distortion is even stronger than thought based on the PwC research,” DUO said. “These are regrettable observations, which once again make it clear that we must and will do the audit process differently.”

DUO stressed that Algorithm Audit used the term “bias” in its findings. “This refers to measured disproportions in the data as an unintended effect of the way the process is set up,” the agency said. The discrimination was not intentional.