Fairness Theatre: Evaluating Post-Hoc Fairness Interventions in Vendor-Controlled Early Warning Systems

Excerpt

arXiv:2609.38552v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Public institutions increasingly procure AI systems whose design they cannot inspect or change. In higher education, proprietary Early Warning Systems (EWS) leave colleges with few options beyond adjusting model outputs to address inequity. This raises the question of how fairness work is coordinated among vendors, institutions, advisors, and students with unequal power to change these systems? Using student records from a public college in Ontar