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