The Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) has published a new report advocating for centralised admissions procedures for applications to the University of Oxford and the University of Cambridge, arguing that the current collegiate system increases the opacity and complexity for applicants and their teachers.

Charlotte Armstrong, author of the report, told Cherwell that the collegiate admissions system “can place a significant burden on teachers and advisers trying to support students, and risks discouraging capable applicants who may see the system as confusing or inaccessible”. In the report, Armstrong pointed to several factors complicating the admissions process, such as variation in outreach funding, fragmented outreach provision, and poor institutional coordination.

Alongside its national outreach initiatives, such as UNIQ, the University delegates regional outreach to colleges. The University’s Common Framework for Admissions outlines shared principles and procedures to “ensure a fair, consistent and academically rigorous admissions process across all subjects and colleges.” 

However, HEPI’s report noted the impact of the huge wealth disparity between colleges: In 2024, Christ Church College’s endowment (£758 million) was around 17 times that of St Anne’s College (£44 million). According to the think tank, these differences prevent there being a consistent level of support and connection, with some colleges budgeting up to twelve times more on widening access than others. Armstrong told Cherwell that “this risks creating an uneven landscape where a student’s exposure to Oxbridge – and the guidance and support they receive – can depend on their geography, and which colleges happen to have been allocated to their area.”

In its application guidance, the University describes how “while it may look different from applications to other universities, each part of the process has a clear purpose and guidance to help you understand what to expect.” Applications to Oxford involve an earlier deadline for UCAS personal statements and references, choosing between applying to a specific college or an open application, a potential admissions assessment and/or submission of written work and at least one interview, all before the main January deadline for UCAS has passed. HEPI’s research identified Oxford’s additional application requirements and earlier timelines as another factor limiting students’ and teachers’ ability to navigate the admissions process. 

In response to these barriers to transparent and accessible admissions procedures, HEPI has recommended a multi-stage approach, culminating in full centralisation of Oxford applications. The proposed first step would be to develop a more consistent approach to interviewing to establish a more level playing field for students and teachers. 

Under a fully centralised application model, applicants could be interviewed by academic staff from several colleges before being allocated to a college through a ranked preference method. This system would, as Armstrong told Cherwell, “reduce the risk of strong candidates missing out because of where they applied and make the system clearer, more transparent and fairer from a student’s perspective”.

With Trinity in full swing, and the mornings finally getting light enough to justify a pre-8am wakeup, I’ve started running earlier in the day (in spite of the pollen count’s mission to decimate anyone brave enough to stray into Oxford’s green spaces). And, as those runs have grown longer, so has my need for something to fill them, particularly since my carefully curated Y2K playlist is wearing thin. No stranger to the world of podcasts, but definitely someone who has largely remained firmly on the fringes of that particular corner of the internet, I decided it might be time to swap my beloved playlists for something different. 

As a staunch fan of Dish – a food podcast hosted by Angela Hartnett and Nick Grimshaw, which interviews celebrity guests on their favourite dishes and relationship with food – and very much a creature of habit, I found it hard to branch out. Perhaps it’s because of sheer saturation: on their website, the Podcast Index reports a total of 4,671,900 podcasts ‘registered’ with them (each one required to have at least three episodes, and at least one of those to be over three minutes long), and such high numbers make innovation within the genre challenging. It’s hard to make your mark in the podcast scene when it is, format-wise, literally just people talking, making reliance on the entertainment value of a particular topic imperative. Or maybe it was simply my fried attention span, which struggled when confronted with 50 minutes of chatting. 

As a staunch fan of Dish – a food podcast hosted by Angela Hartnett and Nick Grimshaw, which interviews celebrity guests on their favourite dishes and relationship with food – and very much a creature of habit, I found it hard to branch out. Perhaps it’s because of sheer saturation: on their website, the Podcast Index reports a total of 4,671,900 podcasts ‘registered’ with them (each one required to have at least three episodes, and at least one of those to be over three minutes long), and such high numbers make innovation within the genre challenging. It’s hard to make your mark in the podcast scene when it is, format-wise, literally just people talking, making reliance on the entertainment value of a particular topic imperative. Or maybe it was simply my fried attention span, which struggled when confronted with 50 minutes of chatting. 

I couldn’t help but notice, however, that one of the reasons for my disillusionment with the genre was likely the glaring gender imbalance, often when it came to the most successful, well-known podcasts. A quick glance at the top ten in Spotify’s UK Podcasts Charts is telling, with the chart dominated by podcasts written and produced by men, with the exception of The Rest is Entertainment, co-hosted by Marina Hyde and Richard Osman, The Rest is Politics US with Katty Kay and Anthony Scaramucci, and The News Agents, featuring top journalist Emily Maitlis. It is interesting, though, that when women’s voices do appear in this top ten, they are often present as part of an ensemble. This is not to downplay the importance of their voices, or what they have to say; however, the lack of representation of standalone female voices in this high-profile list should ring alarm bells. 

Similar numbers can be seen beyond Spotify. A 2025 study from Sounds Profitable suggests that twice as many men create podcasts as women. This is not to say that women don’t produce or host successful podcasts – and in fact, the same study informs us that female creators show better retention once they’re established – but when we consider, for example, the average UK listener on a homeward commute, their exposure to female-produced content is considerably less than it ought to be. 

There is also the fact that male-produced podcasts have increasingly become assimilated with the voices of the far right. Andrew Tate gained fame partly through his official channel, Tate Speech on the platform Rumble, where his ‘Emergency Meeting’ episodes provide discussions on legal situations and media debates. Right-wing public figures such as Ben Shapiro dominate top charts for conservative shows, and Infowars with Alex Jones has served as a long-standing platform for conspiracy theories and anti-globalist narratives since 1991, before its closure earlier this year (and, in an ironic twist of fate, it is set to be taken over by satirical newspaper The Onion).

This is the dark side of podcasting. Requiring little more than decent recording equipment and access to the internet, it becomes a platform for anyone willing to talk for over three minutes, where personal opinions are laid down as fact and dangerous narratives are bounced around in an echo-chamber soundproofed by male voices. It is easy to write off some of these ‘manosphere’ podcasts as meaningless prattle, and they have certainly been subject to parody – even four years ago, SNL’s ‘Podcast Set’ sketch, centring on a fired employee who is gifted a Fisher-Price ‘Podcast set for white guys’ at his leaving party, was right on the money – but the rhetoric used by many of these men gains currency outside of the podcast sphere. Indeed, the business model of many podcasts is such that, in order to avoid one-dimensionality, brand deals, spin-offs, live shows, and Patreon subscriptions, promoted on social media, build an ecosystem that reaches far beyond the recording studio. 

There is, I hasten to add, no shortage of high-quality, creative female-and-queer-produced podcasts around. And they are often highly successful – My Therapist Ghosted Me has sold out multiple nights at Dublin’s 3Arena for its live shows, whilst The Log Books, a podcast on LGBTQ+ history, won Best New Podcast at the British Podcast Awards in 2020. But it is not simply the presence of women’s voices in the podcast industry which is important – it’s the sense of intimacy which is often created. Listening to the same voices each week, often in the same, strangely personal settings – like my runs around Oxford, or washing dishes after making dinner – establishes a kind of companionship, which is part of what makes the medium so persuasive.

But not all forms of conversational intimacy are made equal. Podcasts such as Dish, with its rotating guests and easy cohost dynamic, feel balanced and genuinely dialogic, where conversation serves to exchange perspectives rather than consolidate authority. Other podcasts, however – not only those in the ‘manosphere’, but also those in its orbit, or those who parody it so closely that the distinction begins to collapse – rely on a different dynamic entirely. In these cases, the performed casualness of the medium can conceal something more ominous. When a lone voice speaks, at length and unchecked, confidence soon begins to resemble expertise, and this is the hallmark of many of these popular male-produced podcasts.

The issue, then, is not that men occupy these intimate listening spaces, but that the podcasting industry seems to reward the performance of masculine certainty within them. And in a medium built on this relationship between listener and speaker, the voices we spend hours listening to will inevitably come to shape the way we understand the world. As such, it may be time to listen a little more closely.