By choosing to indefinitely continue online interviews, colleges (with the exception of Trinity) will make the application system less reliable, and less fair. Interviews are vital to giving fellows a holistic picture of applicants, turning them from a data file into a rounded human being. If done right, and properly invested in, they make the application process fairer and more humane. But done like this, they risk making Cambridge yet more inaccessible, despite the change being entirely unnecessary.

As an overwhelming volume of evidence about online learning during the pandemic has shown, maintaining online interviews is contrary to equal opportunity. The University may expect applicants to have access to a stable internet connection and a quiet room, but the reality is far more complicated. Students in rural areas are likely to struggle far more than their peers; students who rely on their phone for internet access will be put at a significant disadvantage to those with laptops; students in crowded living space or without rooms of their own will be unable to perform as well in many cases, and even when they do, will be unable to focus as completely.

Online interviews represent a step backward, causing far more issues than they solve

Making interviews online also risks making interviews open-book. For students at top schools, or who have paid for extensive tutoring, they may be able to directly access the huge number of resources they have been given. Students replete with practice interview feedback, speaking pointers, or pre-prepared answers are even better positioned now to make the most of them, including in the interview itself- and the only way to avoid this would be to demand ever more anti-cheating measures that involve students filming themselves, which are expensive and inaccessible.

In-person interviews were not perfect. There were huge disparities between colleges in the provision of accommodation and the funding of travel. Cambridge can well afford to provide the funding required to level opportunities- and ought to. But online interviews represent a step backward, that cause far more issues than they solve.

Equally important, the interview process has the potential to humanise a place that can be deeply alien to students. Making small talk with fellow interviewees in the waiting room, discussing college life with JCR helpers in the year or two years above you, are all to be replaced by the cold, blank screen of a Zoom waiting room, and a deafening silence afterwards. Many successful applicants will now arrive at their college having no idea how it looks or feels.

Approaching three years on from the start of the pandemic, colleges cannot keep abusing the excuse of the pandemic to pursue yet more destructive cost-cutting. From rent hikes to curfews, to unprecedented restrictions on visits from other students, college bureaucrats continue to use the pandemic to justify power grabs. Students, and now applicants, bear the brunt of sustained college overreach. JCRs, the SU, dons, alumni and students cannot let colleges continue to hide behind such excuses and must push for interviews to be held in person again.

No doubt, when students start applying in great numbers to Trinity, the only college now willing to fund an in-person interview process, they will reconsider. Until then, college administrators intend to embark on a path that almost every student and every fellow will be opposed to, for the sake of cost-cutting, at the price of centuries of tradition. We hope wiser heads prevail.