Admissions at Trinity Hall, Cambridge
The Guardian recently published a piece on Trinity Hall College, Cambridge. I taught brilliant students there during my PhD, so I have been following the story quite closely and thinking about it.
Initial Piece
The focus of the Guardian report was a memo describing ambitions to target recruitment from certain (Expensive) private schools in certain subjects: Music, Classics, and Languages. Alongside the specific plan to actively approach private schools more systematically, the language of the memo attracted significant criticism, specifically the quoted sentence “It is important that the crucial task of securing greater fairness in admissions does not unintentionally result in reverse discrimination.”
WonkHE
WonkHE played a pretty straight bat in its analysis, explaining the technical requirements of admission to these particular subjects and contextualising the small number of students recruited. The college’s claim in this piece that their Widening Participation policy hadn’t changed is interesting in what it doesn’t say: questions about the culture of admissions are likely more central than ones of strategy.
HEPI
HEPI considered the action in the context of wider sector-level behaviour on Widening Participation, asking perceptive questions about what WP looks like when the subjects taught in elite Universities don’t match the preparation provided to children in state education.
Guardian (2)
The Guardian ran comment pieces from a couple of interesting perspectives. Lee Eliot Major, a professor of Social Mobility, rehearsed the central arguments about Oxbridge not doing enough without tailoring the piece too closely to this particular case (or even, arguably, this particular University). The objectivity of his position was somewhat undermined by describing in some detail how his consultancy work with companies has been successful; those who wish to hear more can doubtless learn a lot from his forthcoming book Cracking the Class Codes later in 2026. For what it’s worth, in recent reporting his University has a higher proportion of privately-educated students than Cambridge.
Guardian (3)
A post-bag piece on various responses was headlined using Cambridge Language graduate Alistair Campbell’s response to the story. Again, plenty of general arguments about the simple fact of Cambridge’s socially elite composition, together with some speculation about one motivation being future alumni donations. The article also has the Master of the college reaffirming a commitment to widening participation.
Me
I have been a part of this system, and I have thought about some of these admissions questions quite a lot while at Oxford. I think the particular case is much less interesting than what it tells you about Cambridge, so what I want to write about is how this event relates to specific educational structures. I will start with the least Cambridge-sympathetic points, swing into sympathy, and then try to resolve something from the synthesis.
Students and Applicants and Rejections require more respect than this
The language of the memo presumably tried to balance the diverse views of the fellows into some majority position of a way forwards, and my best guess – given the timing – is that this “reverse discrimination” idea comes from ad hoc anecdotes of a few vocal colleagues after a gruelling course of admissions interviews at the end of 2025. Representing those views in a memo would be one way of showing that these people were heard in the wider conversation, and I understand that it needn’t represent the whole fellowship or the substance of college policy. I expect there is fantastic work relating to outreach in the college, and I particularly regret that the staff doing this have had their already-undervalued work minimised in the subsequent reporting.
At the same time, the fact that this language has been given formal validation in this way does speak to the wider culture of the college. I have great sympathy for the fellows who don’t take this view, but such an ideologically-loaded term is difficult to understand as only an unfortunate choice of words. Imagine what a state-educated Music student in their second year feels when they read about their college drafting formal memos like this. Imagine what the bright state school reject feels when they read this story about the college they applied to five years ago. Imagine what the person holding an offer from the college thinks as they start back at school in 2026 and their Spanish teacher asks them how the interview went. An institution says something about itself when it tolerates and uses language conveying a disdain for the best efforts of applicants in its internal documentation. However misrepresented the college may feel, this news story is about the substance of college culture.
Mechanisms for Compromise
The act of publishing the memo is interesting. It seems possible (?likely?) that one of the fellows leaked the memo to the Guardian, a newspaper with a predictably-oppositional editorial agenda. This is an extreme step for a colleague to take, and it is worth considering what needs to have gone wrong in an institution for someone to go through with a leak likely to advance a negative view of the college. The choice to seek external support suggests that there might be insufficient support within the college for people who sit on a certain side of a certain argument. It is interesting that the specific subject of the leak was admissions policy. I wonder how many meetings with language like “reverse discrimination” someone would have to endure before escalating the stakes like this.
Underneath this is a very general problem of academic community, though. How do we compromise? How do we stay on good terms while we argue over zero-sum policy positions? How do meetings of Governing Body centre and marginalise different voices? People have individual agency, but all communities have structures which advance and frustrate certain habits of thought. “Who belongs in Trinity Hall?” is a question which could be asked of the staff body as well as its students. Do people advancing access feel like valued members of the community, or do they feel isolated and powerless? Does their language get represented elsewhere in the memo?
It keeps you honest
It won’t feel like it to anyone at Trinity Hall right now, but this kind of media scrutiny does have some upsides in the long run. By holding feet to the fire, the media mechanism keeps Cambridge focused on access in ways which serve a substantial social good. Whatever emotions are floating around the common room, the fellows have the chance to move forwards in a sincerely positive direction.
Subject-Specific Requirements
I have significant sympathy for the position of those making admissions decisions here. Some courses require certain prerequisites: a knowledge of German is not an arbitrary access requirement for a German degree, and there are well-documented pipeline problems with the decline in people taking languages at A Level.
It is not unreasonable to think creatively about recruitment in these circumstances, even if this particular creative solution has obvious difficulties. As the pool of people taking certain A Levels shrinks, it is sensible to look more systematically for possible recruits.
Cambridge-Specific Requirements
But the problem isn’t (yet) the raw number of state school pupils taking A Level German. The problem is that there aren’t enough of them getting sky-high grades. In the context of colleges – which largely don’t have control over the assessments set in Departments – the pragmatic choice in front of fellows is whether to admit someone who will struggle on a course which has been built around a rigid expectation of what an entrant looks like.
Excellence and Access
This puts any college in a bind. It wants excellent students, and it can’t admit not-excellent students. This situation becomes a problem when the pool of sufficiently-qualified applicants shrinks because it forces the college to either recruit fewer people or recruit people who do not have the tried-and-tested entry profile for the course. To be clear on my own view here: this is not because the applicants are weak, but rather because the demands of the course are outdated: the requirements do not properly match the qualifications of today’s school pupils.
Departments define Excellence
One solution to this problem is to review the course. If you have built a degree around entrants with A* grades in Latin but are increasingly struggling to find such people, you could ask if there are ways of making something brilliant out of entrants with A* grades in English or Maths. Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t: but it’s worth a look. In my understanding of Cambridge, though, colleges do not have this power: Departments do. A college interviewer in December needs to judge whether the applicant in front of them can manage the course in October.
The other option is to build degrees around a lower entry tariff. Is there a way of making something brilliant out of applicants with “only” an A in Latin? (“Only” a B?) Most Universities would say that there is, but it is certainly also true that teaching such students would be a change from current practice at Cambridge. Teaching would become harder in this situation, and it is not clear that Cambridge has invested in building the technical teaching skill or the communities of teaching practice which such an approach would require. Again, constructing the course differently is not an action a college can take. Again, I understand that this is a Departmental power.
Synthesis
Which probably brings us to the point everyone agrees on: success at Cambridge is about students meeting the rigid expectations implicit in the design of its highly-demanding courses, and some of those expectations are about what a student is like on Day 1. Some people think those expectations are good, others think they’re bad. But everyone thinks they’re there and that they affect admissions.
Changing those expectations is a tremendous technical and political challenge, and one which speaks much more to culture than strategy. The inertia to alter something in an ancient institution is massive; there is an enormous bias towards maintaining the status quo. Q: How many Cambridge academics does it take to change a lightbulb? A: CHANGE!? This structure of (un)accountability is not a bug, it is a feature of Cambridge. The collegiate composition of the University resists change through the way it is constituted, with powerless colleges taking the flak for acknowledging the objective constraints of Departmental course design. An old lightbulb stays put when it becomes broken in the joke, and in the prospectus an old entry requirement stays put when it becomes redundant.
And there is a huge non-Cambridge problem about the uptake of post-16 subjects like Languages which is also a part of the picture. There exists a framing of this story which describes this episode in Cambridge as a part of the terrible decline of Britain’s ambition to connect with the wider world. This makes it particularly symbolic that a college’s response to this crisis involves expensive private schools, retreating to privilege rather than advancing to equity.
Because the really mundane truth is that the facts are well-agreed: the college needs to recruit, recruited students need to be incredibly good, this is hard to do. The substantial disagreement is about what the future looks like. Will Cambridge be a place where new things happen, or one where old things persist? The reason that the language of “reverse discrimination” is so incendiary here is that it speaks to the prejudices of the body deciding on the shape of things to come.
A Different Story: Elite Insulation
There is another way to tell this story which isn’t about Cambridge, but rather about Languages, Music, and Classics.
A Cambridge college is able to opt out of the pipeline problems for these disciplines in the same way that a rich commuter can drive to work rather than use decaying public transport. Such behaviour changes the goals of parties who can buy their way out of society. If you can insulate yourself from a bad bus route or the difficulties of state education, your incentive structure becomes less aligned with solving these problems. The commuter driving into work doesn’t need to write to their MP about the bus franchise (they stop thinking about the bus). The professor teaching French by the Cam doesn’t need to write to their MP about school languages provision.
If you think the central problem is about elite education, it makes sense to centre the exclusionary flavour of one college’s actions in your story. But if you think the central problem is that children aren’t able to learn Languages (or Music, or Classics) then this narrative won’t do. So here’s a different story: the secondary education problem is now so acute that Cambridge is running scared. You can criticise a commuter for driving rather than taking the bus, sure, but it would be better to fix the bus route. That’s the harder option, the more expensive option, and the better option. It’s also much less satisfying to read about.
Conclusion: Cambridge and Power
Something I notice in the reporting is that all the criticism of Cambridge comes from a tremendous respect for the power it has as an institution. If Cambridge wants to start a national Languages Renaissance, it – more-or-less uniquely – probably has the clout to do it. Building a brighter future is difficult, yes, but if Cambridge is truly so committed to recruiting excellent people then its staff are surely capable of doing something positive with the privilege of their station.
Making the college the bad guy in this story emphasises its agency: in this account they are unwilling to change. A scarier story is that Cambridge may be structurally unable to change, at least at the pace and scale demanded by the circumstances. If the most privileged scholars in the country don’t believe in the future of Britain’s state education despite being given every opportunity to recruit the very best, though, it’s worth asking questions about why this situation has arisen and how it might be remedied.