A 29-year-old Rhodes scholar and entrepreneur from New Zealand gained a reputation for helping students as young as 11 to get admission to their dream colleges, including prestigious Ivy League schools like Harvard.
Jamie Beaton founded Crimson Education, an education mentoring program, at the age of 17 and charges between $30,000 and $200,000 for a four to six-year program, according to Daily Mail.
According to Beaton, young people should start identifying their interests and skills before high school. He advises students to focus on areas where they can excel while also finding innovative ways to stand out, such as obtaining scholarships or engaging in entrepreneurship. Children from various countries have traveled to New York City to seek Beaton’s advice.
Beaton, who has attended Harvard, Stanford, Oxford, Tsinghua, UPenn, and Yale, believes that Ivy League schools maintain their tax-free status by rejecting a large number of potential students. He questions, ‘If they are doing so much good for society then why don’t they increase the number of students who come in?’
He recommends that students aim for 10 activities related to one or two themes, with one focusing on social justice. Beaton prefers to start working with children as young as 11 to prepare them for high school. One of his students referred to him as ‘the Steve Jobs of college counseling.’
Crimson Education offers scholarships and free services to around 130 college counseling clients, including a program that assists more than 30 Maori students in gaining admission to elite schools both within and outside the U.S. Since 2016, 1,003 students in the program have received offers from Ivy League schools.
Beaton’s clientele this year alone has made up approximately two percent of students admitted to elite schools, including Harvard, Columbia, and Brown. His young clients include 24 who were accepted to Yale, 34 to Stanford, and 48 to Cornell.
The program includes tutoring in test-taking, academics, advice on building strong teacher recommendations, and guidance on launching extracurricular activities such as publishing research papers, starting podcasts, and writing books, Daily Mail reported.
Beaton’s success at Crimson Education is attributed to the high demand for elite college admissions and the limited number of available seats. Alex Robertson, who runs Tiger Management, the high-profile hedge fund that Beaton worked at in college and invested in Crimson, believes that this demand will persist.
In July, Beaton raised $75 million from venture funds, acquired five counseling businesses that turned into an online high school, and established 26 offices in 21 countries. During his own high school years, Beaton strived to be ‘the most qualified’ by earning straight A’s, starting two businesses, participating in debating and engineering competitions, and working a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant.
After high school, Beaton was accepted into 25 universities, including Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, Duke, and Cambridge. He realized he could make a difference by sharing his success story during his senior year in college.
Despite his remarkable achievements, Beaton believes that cracking the college admissions process is not rocket science. He argues that just as one can train for sports or improve mathematics skills with high-dosage tutoring, it is possible to enhance aspects of one’s college application.