“I stood looking over my damaged home and tried to forget the sweetness of life on Earth.”
– Emily St John Mandel, Station Eleven 

In a world on the brink of a catastrophe, Miranda Caroll draws the story of Dr Eleven. 

Dr Eleven, a jaded physicist, lives on a space station the size of our moon after escaping from the ruins of a destroyed Earth. The planet’s artificial sky was damaged when they fled from an alien invasion, leaving its surface in perpetual twilight. Human communities live in the Undersea, a lonely network of submarines and fallout shelters under the space station’s oceans. The creator of this kaleidoscopic world, Miranda, is a shipping executive by day and comic artist by night. Miranda is one of many characters – the toughest, or perhaps the tenderest – to populate Emily St John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic epic, Station Eleven: a story of pandemic survivors trying to navigate the ruthless wilderness of a world without civilisation. 

Dr Eleven’s story is one of conflict and melancholy, of anger and longing. So is Mandel’s Station Eleven. As Mandel’s narrative spans across temporalities both before and after the catastrophe of a world-ending contagion, we observe the traumas inflicted upon a landscape when law and order crumble. We observe the cruelty of a fragmented world and its inhabitants’ attempts to survive and heal. Just as memory is power, art becomes a tool for survival. 

The world before the contagion is populated by Arthur Leander, Miranda Caroll, Clarke Thompson, and their contemporaries, who navigate lives of triumph and heartbreak with a lostness that is deeply human. By contrast, the post-pandemic generation confronts a lawless wasteland of violence. Kirsten Raymonde, our narrator, performs Shakespeare for the enduring human settlements with a troupe of musicians calling themselves the Travelling Symphony. In this lost land, each character seeks their own solace. Some turn towards religion and violence, conjuring fables in a distorted fantasy of new gods and prophets. Others, like Kirsten and her companions, inscribe through memories and artmaking. 

Electricity and gas become myths to the children of this new world. The aeroplane becomes a symbol of manmade freedom. The Symphony salvages food and clothing from abandoned houses. They build fires as the generators run out of propane. They whisper old words of poetry and pluck tunes on old strings, clinging to some semblance of familiarity in a land no longer recognisable. 

Mandel’s voice is elegiac. Sections of the novel become a chorus of mourning. “No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below. No more ball games played under floodlights. No more towns glimpsed from the sky through aeroplane windows. No more flight. No more cities.” This polyphony of voices mourns the loss of human infrastructure with a haunting mixture of grief and tranquillity. 

Did Earth ever belong to us, or have we only borrowed it for too long? Mandel investigates questions and claims of ownership. The lives we meticulously build rest on a perilous network of manmade structures, ranging from social norms to resource access. But these structures of technology and the socioeconomic systems can collapse. Our time on Earth is fundamentally transient, vulnerable to entropic forces insentient to human existence. 

The only way to honour this impermanent earth is to make art about it. Miranda sketches visions of a fictional world that bleeds into a bruised sunset along the Malaysian coast, just as the Symphony scrapes together performances of Shakespeare and Beethoven in the ruins of a new land. Art anchors us to identity. It is our armour. A survival without identity, without imagination, is meaningless. 

Art is power. The thirst for beauty connects us when we are floundering, cast adrift.  In a stroke of metafiction, Mandel’s novel shares its name with the title of Miranda’s comic: Station Eleven. At the novel’s climax, Kirsten is captured by Tyler Leander, whose cultivation of a manic religion has earned him the name ‘prophet’ and a cult following. With a gun pointed at Kirsten’s forehead, Tyler quotes from the comic: “We long only to go home. We dream of sunlight, we dream of walking on earth.” Kirsten quotes it back at him and, in doing so, stalls her own death. In a world where their shared language is violence, these words open a bridge across the divide of blood and hatred. 

This shared devotion to a comic book tethers the two to their humanity. Kirsten survives because both she and Tyler are joined, however momentarily, by a power greater than themselves. 

“We have been lost for so long. We long only for the world we were born into.”

Does anything at all belong to us? This spectacle we call society can be uprooted in the blink of an eye. This claim over our Earth – our cities, our factories, our electric towers – is perilous. We are easily broken. Yet Station Eleven not only acknowledges but celebrates our fragility. The novel demonstrates how speculative fiction is a genre ultimately concerned with the relationship between the environment and the individual, between Earth and humanity. By the end of the novel, our wandering characters survive in a shaky diaspora, imagining a painstaking reemergence of human society as they cradle each other for warmth. There are no answers, but there is the hope of an endless search. 

We must do this, I think. We must make stories out of our own fragility. We must write novels about the world ending that manage, also, to be breathlessly hopeful. This is our power. To stare our demise right in the face, to imagine beyond the lives we know. 

We are owed nothing except our store of carbon. The Earth does not endow us with the right to claim anything but the people we are, at a moment in time: memories, thoughts, scars, and all. As Mandel’s characters wander a world beyond the edge, confronting the brute of physics, the harsh lashings of a landscape, they discover in themselves a ruthless optimism that mutates to survive. This is how we live on an Earth that is temporarily borrowed. This is how we survive. This is how we ache, and long, and lust for life.

Oxford is keen to tell a particular story about itself: that it is open, that it is trying, that it is changing. Without a doubt, this rings true, particularly on a financial level, as exemplified by the generous Crankstart Scholarship and the University’s many hardship funds. And to be clear, they matter. For many students, that money is the difference between being here and not. 

But there is a quieter problem embedded in how this support is structured and discussed – one that reveals a set of assumptions about working-class students that the University has yet to fully confront. At its core, the issue is not the existence of financial support, but the expectations that come attached to it. 

Schemes like Crankstart tend to operate on the premise that financial disadvantage is primarily a matter of shortfall. Give students money, and the problem is essentially solved. This sounds reasonable until you consider what it assumes – namely, that recipients already possess the knowledge, confidence, and cultural fluency to manage that money “correctly” within Oxford’s uniquely opaque financial landscape.

But money at Oxford is not neutral. It comes embedded in systems like battels, college charges, book grants, rent schedules, vacation storage fees, formal wear expectations, unpaid internships, and the subtle but constant pressure to spend in ways that signal belonging. Knowing how to navigate these is not intuitive. It is learned often informally, sometimes through family experience, and long before arriving here.

Working-class students are far less likely to have had that exposure. Yet the structure of support assumes they will simply “figure it out.” This assumption shows up in small, but consequential, ways. Funds are frequently disbursed in lump sums, with little guidance beyond generic budgeting advice. Hardship applications require students to anticipate and articulate financial needs in a system they may not yet understand. There is an implicit expectation that students will know when to save, when to spend, and when to ask for more – all the while managing the social pressures of a university where spending norms are rarely explicit.

This gap is intensified by how difficult it is to earn money while at Oxford. Term-time work is typically discouraged in favour of prioritising academic commitments, leaving many students with little flexibility to respond to unexpected costs or social pressures. The assumption is that financial support will be enough. When it is not, there are few alternatives. The option to simply “work more” – a common fallback elsewhere – is largely closed off, further narrowing the margin for error. 

When things go wrong, the burden quietly shifts back onto the student. Overspent? You should have budgeted better. Didn’t apply in time? You should have known the system. Struggling socially because you can’t afford to participate? That’s unfortunate, but invisible. The underlying message is subtle but powerful: you have been given the opportunity, now it is your responsibility to make it work.

But is it not natural that, upon receiving extra money in your bank account – possibly more than you have ever had before – you would be tempted to spend dramatically? Those Ryanair flights for a European city break? Suddenly affordable. Tesco Finest over their value products? Why not treat yourself? 

Initially, it might seem obvious to respond to this gap with more “support” in the form of budgeting workshops, financial literacy sessions, or compulsory guidance on managing money at Oxford. But this risks reproducing the same problem in a different form.

If framed incorrectly, these initiatives can feel deeply patronising. They rest on the assumption that working-class students lack basic financial competence, and that they need to be taught how to budget, rather than supported in navigating a system that is itself unusually complex. In reality, many students from lower-income backgrounds arrive at Oxford already highly skilled in managing limited resources. The issue is not ignorance, but context.

Budgeting at Oxford is not the same as budgeting at home. It involves decoding unfamiliar charges, anticipating irregular expenses, and negotiating social expectations that are rarely spelt out. A workshop on “how to manage your money” does little to address this, and risks talking down to the very students it claims to support.

What’s needed instead is not remedial education, but structural clarity. Clearer information about likely costs, more transparency from colleges, and a recognition that the difficulty lies not in students’ abilities, but in the University’s complexity, at both a social and institutional level. We all have different relationships with money, which therefore makes blanket advice on budgeting pretty pointless. We all know what we should be doing, but how we implement it when suddenly able to afford that round of shots, dinner out, or a last-minute ticket, is far less straightforward. 

The issue is not a lack of discipline or understanding, but the collision between individual financial habits and an environment where spending is both highly visible and socially loaded. In that context, generic advice about restraint offers little real guidance. 

What students need is not to be told how to budget, but to be given a clearer sense of the landscape they are budgeting within – one where expectations, pressures, and costs are made explicit, rather than left to be inferred. 

Until that visibility exists, the burden will remain unevenly distributed. Students will continue to arrive equipped to meet the academic demands of the University, but left to decipher its financial and social logic alone. 

Access without understanding is not access at all. And that is a gap no scholarship, however generous, or life-changing, can fully close.

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”.