Crimson Founder Jamie Beaton Featured in The New York Times, 31-Year-Old New Zealander Holds About 12 Higher Degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and More
The New York Times Style section published a feature on Jamie Beaton, stating that this 31-year-old New Zealander has obtained about 12 higher degrees from Harvard, Yale, Oxford, and is currently pursuing more. He posted that seeing his educational journey on the front page of a newspaper felt unreal and shared that he built Crimson Education almost entirely while in university.
He graduated in 2016 with a bachelor's degree and a master's in applied mathematics from Harvard, followed by an MBA and a master's in educational technology from Stanford, a JD from Yale, and a DPhil in public policy from Oxford (as a Rhodes Scholar). He also remotely or in-person obtained master's degrees in educational entrepreneurship from the University of Pennsylvania, finance from Princeton, medical policy and economics from Cornell, implementation science from Dartmouth, war studies from King's College London, and global affairs from Tsinghua University. He is currently studying data science at Brown and taking journalism courses at Columbia. He graduated high school with offers from about 25 institutions including Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.
Crimson is reported to be valued at over $600 million, with approximately $554 million in funding rounds, backed by investors including Tiger Global, Icehouse Ventures, former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key, and Verlinvest. While at Harvard, he joined about 15 student organizations and emailed Julian Robertson, founder of Tiger Management, in his sophomore year, later commuting between Boston and New York twice a week; Tiger eventually invested in the company. At the start of his time at Columbia, he mistakenly attended an entrepreneurship class at the University of Auckland due to a scheduling error, but managed to keep up with assignments and met his current wife in class. Lisa Belkin made an exception to write about him; Amy Chua commented that he couldn't stop applying for things.
At the same time, he initiated a hostile takeover of Kip McGrath for about $28 million. If he continues accumulating degrees at this rate, he may catch up to Benjamin B. Bolger, who had 16 degrees by age 50. The company claims that clients have a sevenfold higher acceptance rate into Ivy League and similar schools compared to the overall applicant pool.
In market mechanisms, the buyers are families willing to pay high prices for consulting to gain entry into prestigious schools, while the sellers are the educational industry that turns their degree chains into product brochures. The event is driven by the newspaper's front page, shifting attention from AI making courses cheaper to the rising prices of top diplomas and networks; the beneficiaries are intermediaries who can package and sell the rights to selection and recognition, while those under pressure are those who only sell course content that can be replicated by models.
Source: Public Information
ABAB AI Insight
Beaton treats prestigious schools as additive infrastructure: earlier degrees supplement specific skills, while later ones become a method for continuous entry into new disciplines and networks of peers. Crimson does not sell knowledge itself, but the process of getting a teenager into the sight of admissions committees. He is both a student and a ticket seller, with his resume serving as a living advertisement.
The capital path began at 17 when he started a company in his Harvard dorm, using time zone differences to turn New Zealand nights into Boston workdays, and then converting Julian Robertson's weekly commuting relationship into checks. The more degrees he accumulates, the easier it is to establish a consulting premium: clients are buying the map he has traveled. The acquisition of Kip McGrath is a horizontal expansion of the same anxiety industry into a tutoring chain.
Similar structures include the early industrialization of SAT training, Wall Street turning Ivy League alumni networks into fundraising channels, and Rhodes Scholars monetizing scholarship resumes into institutional positions. Higher education is in a split period of free content and rising credential prices: models can create learning paths in hours, but who recognizes what you have learned is still priced by admissions offices and peer networks.
Structurally, this represents a transfer of pricing power. The mechanism is that when the price of knowledge falls, scarcity shifts from courses to selection; whoever controls the recognition rights can continue to raise entry fees while AI lowers tuition. Universities are impacted as content factories, but still increase prices as identity exchanges.
ABAB News · Cognitive Laws
When knowledge becomes cheaper, being recognized for what you have learned becomes more expensive.
The thicker the stack of degrees, the less you are selling courses, but rather tickets for entry.
Courses can be replaced by models, but peer networks cannot yet be.