Caroline Calloway, an Instagram influencer famous for documenting her life at Cambridge, has said she is afraid the university will remove her degree, after publicly revealing that she falsified her application. 

In an interview with the Evening Standard, St. Edmund’s College alumnus and American influencer Caroline Calloway admitted that losing the accreditation “would be a big blow to my ego".

Calloway gained popularity by documenting her life at Cambridge on Instagram, achieving a social media following of over 600,000. During her time as a student, Calloway was allegedly nicknamed ‘the Gatsby of Cambridge’, choosing to rent rooms in Downing and King’s, rather than St. Edmund’s which she believed to be “objectively the worst” college.

But in May 2023 Calloway revealed in an interview with Vanity Fair that she falsified her school transcript from the elite boarding school, Phillips Exeter Academy, in the USA to get into Cambridge. Her decision to do so came after applying to Cambridge three times (along with Yale, Harvard and Oxford over a four-year period), before finally being admitted in 2013 at the age of 22 to study Art History.

Calloway publicly acknowledged that “her Cambridge friends have known for years” of her forgery, and that the potential loss of her degree would not take away “the things that count” – “the friendships, the memories and the plots for future books.”

Despite the glamorisation of her time at Cambridge on social media, Calloway recently revealed in her 2023 memoir, Scammer, that during this time she had to deal with her and her father’s struggles with suicide and her addiction to Adderall.

When approached for comment a spokesperson from St. Edmund’s told Varsity: “We cannot comment on individual students, however we take statements like this very seriously.”

Cambridge University was also contacted for comment.