How To Get Into Harvard (Part 7) - The Guru Who Says He Can Get Your 11-Year-Old Into Harvard
A spicy translation of WSJ's feature on the lucrative "elite" college admissions consulting game and its top hustler - Crimson Education CEO Jamie Beaton
Comrades: If you pay $200,000 to Ivy guru Jamie Beaton, you can brag that you earned the right to pay $300,000 for Harvard to indoctrinate your kids.
Jamie Beaton, the founder and CEO of Crimson Education, was recently profiled by the Wall Street Journal. He is collecting institutional credentials like demoralized Pokemon cards in his quest to milk insecure, status-conscious parents for cash. The Forbes 30 Under 30 LinkedIn flex is notorious for clout-chasing frauds like SBF/FTX and Elizabeth at Theranos, both of whom are now in prison.
I give respect to anyone who hustles to build a successful business. However, college consulting is fraught with predatory incentives and conflicts of interest. Market timing is no longer favorable. Respect for “elite” universities continues to plummet, while access to high quality education at lower cost is rising. After disgraced ex-president Claudine Gay’s plagiarism and antisemitism scandals, Harvard’s alumni donations have fallen 15%. Prominent alums like Bill Ackman have declared an intifada against their alma mater. As someone who once held a campus job filing applications in a Demoralized DIEvy League admissions office, I have seen the bowels of the “meritocratic” process. Allow me to serve you a spicy translation of the WSJ propaganda.
The Guru Who Says He Can Get Your 11-Year-Old Into Harvard
Seven children flew into New York in late July to meet with the college counselor they believed would get them into Harvard University or another top-flight U.S. college. Two traveled from Switzerland, two from Australia, one from the United Kingdom. The youngest was 11. They were there to meet Jamie Beaton, a 29-year-old Rhodes scholar from New Zealand with a reputation as the man who has cracked the code on elite college admissions—and who is Wall Street’s favored partner to mine the rich vein of parental anxiety embedded in the college process.
Beaton’s message to the kids distilled: Optimize childhood by starting to build skills and interests years before high school. Strategically choose areas where you can excel—if you aren’t going to be a top performer in an activity, drop it and move to something else. And find ways to be unique, whether through entrepreneurship, scholarship or well-placed PR. “A great education transformed my life,” said the chief executive and co-founder of Crimson Education. “It can change yours too.” The kids took note of every word. “He’s like the Steve Jobs of college counseling,” said one of the attendees, a Japanese high-school student.
Banger clickbait headline. The business model of Crimson Education is a reputation pyramid scheme. Wall Street gamblers have bet on a slick marketer who is leveraging legacy brands that he doesn’t own, while using his own striver credentials to groom more strivers. Imagine what happens to an 11 year old who “optimizes childhood” with PR. Steve Jobs is turning in his grave. This is Wolf of Wall Street devouring Sheep of Ivy League.
Private equity is also paying attention. Crimson, launched in 2013, is now valued at $554 million after several funding rounds, according to PitchBook. Investors include venture capital giants Tiger Management and related firm Tiger Global Management, plus Icehouse Ventures, former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key and Verlinvest, a Brussels-based fund created by the founding families of Anheuser-Busch.
This year, Beaton’s clients made up nearly 2% of students admitted to the undergraduate class of 2028 at several elite schools including Brown, Columbia, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. Among his clients, 24 earned admission to Yale, 34 to Stanford and 48 to Cornell. The acceptance letters were certified by PricewaterhouseCoopers and a list of students admitted were provided by Beaton to The Wall Street Journal. Clients pay Beaton’s firm from $30,000 and $200,000 for a four- to six-year program that includes tutoring in academics and test-taking, and advice on how to gather stellar teacher recommendations and how to execute extracurricular projects. Those can range from writing a book, to publishing an academic research paper or starting a podcast.
Hedge fund titans, former heads of state, and WEF corporations are cashing in on lemmings who want to be like them - all while claiming to be “The Resistance”. Crimson’s website claims to have facilitated 1,000+ Ivy League acceptances and achieved 4.5x boosts to acceptance rates. WSJ ignored the most pertinent questions in this story. Why didn’t they interview any students or parents who didn’t get the results they were promised? What wisdom do high school kids have that is worthy of books and podcasts? And most importantly, are any of these kids happy before and after they get in? I have spent plenty of time around PMC NPCs who gun for jobs at McKinsey and Goldman Sachs, so I can tell you the answer is definitively no.
Crimson has come to dominate an elite slice of the growing U.S. market for help navigating the competitive, confusing and shifting university admission process. Eager families pay more and more for a leg up into an elite school, aiming to acquire what is seen as a vital chip in a winner-take-all economy. Revenue in college consulting overall has tripled to $2.9 billion over 20 years, according to IBISWorld, a market research firm. Around 10,000 people work as full-time college consultants in the U.S., with another 3,000 abroad, said Mark Sklarow, chief executive of the Independent Educational Consultants Association. That’s up from less than 100 in 1990.
There are few regulations or barriers to entry—most are mom and pop shops—and fraud has tainted the industry, including by Rick Singer, the now-jailed ringleader of the Varsity Blues college-admissions cheating scheme. At the top end is Beaton, whose own eye-popping resume is packed with exclusive degrees. He attended Harvard and won a Rhodes scholarship, which he used to earn a Ph.D. in public policy from the University of Oxford. He followed that with two masters from Stanford, one in business and the other in education technology. He also earned a masters in education entrepreneurship from the University of Pennsylvania, a masters in finance from Princeton, a law degree from Yale and a masters in global affairs from Tsinghua University in China.
College consulting exploded 100x from cottage industry to industrial complex in only 30 years. Varsity Blues was just the tip of the iceberg of this hustle. There are even consultants who specialize in sorority rush. Here’s free advice on an easy hack - write an essay about how you overcame adversity as a black, trans activist building solar panels in Gaza.
For Tiger Management, the high-profile hedge fund founded by the late Julian Robertson and now run by his son, Alex Robertson, the case for buying a stake in Crimson boiled down to faith in Beaton—who worked for Tiger as a college student—and confidence that the market for elite degrees would continue to grow, Alex Robertson said. “It’s all supply and demand,” he said “You’re talking about massive interest in demand and not that many more seats.” The number of students applying to the top universities in the U.S. has increased about fivefold over the past three decades, while the increase in class sizes at Ivy League universities is negligible. Admission rates are now below 5% at schools such as Harvard and Yale—down from around 20% two generations ago. Robertson said the unrealized return on the investment in Crimson, which started in 2014, is so far about 130 times. “I don’t think that demand is going anywhere any time soon,” he said.
On a recent morning in July, Beaton took an elevator to the Tiger offices in Midtown Manhattan. A panoramic view of the skyline poured through floor to ceiling windows and internal glass office walls. Picasso’s “Buste de Femme,” worth about $4 million, hung in the lobby. Beaton met with Robertson in a conference room to discuss the business. Over five funding rounds, Beaton has raised $75 million from venture funds. He has set up 26 offices in 21 countries, acquired five counseling businesses that he remade to implement his strategy and built an accredited online high school, which now has 2,000 students. The company employs 850 full-time staff, and has another 3,000 part-time tutors.
Love the casual mention of the $4 million Picasso in Tiger’s office. That’s what sucker customers’ funds are going towards. Harvard diplomas are like Hermes berkin bags. They are status symbols because supply is artificially kept low. They look nice, but have no substance. Their main value is the ability to show it off in dick-measuring contests with fellow commissars or showing off superiority to peasants.
Alexander Rosenthal is a director at Verlinvest, which counts Insomnia Cookies and Vitacoco among its broad portfolio of consumer-based investments. He dismisses the criticism that private college counselors tilt the already skewed playing field of elite college admissions toward the wealthy, saying colleges have set up the system this way. Elite universities take advantage of their tax-free status by claiming they benefit society, he said. But their primary concern is to maintain status and cultivate prestige by rejecting as many students as possible. “If they are doing so much good for society then why don’t they increase the number of students who come in?” he asked.
At Harvard, 23% of freshmen who started in fall 2023 reported working with a private admissions counselor, up from 13% in 2017, according to an annual survey conducted by the student newspaper. Last year, for freshmen from families with incomes over $500,000, 48% used one. Crimson said about 130 of its college counseling clients are on scholarships and get free services. One program has helped more than 30 Maori students earn admission to elite universities, including many in the U.S., Beaton said. In total, the company works with about 8,000 clients across six grades. Another 50,000 students come to the company for tutoring. To start this fall, Crimson had 1,636 students apply to U.S. colleges. Beaton said 294 applications from Crimson students to Ivy League universities were accepted. Since 2016, Crimson students have received 1,003 Ivy League offers.
Elite universities do not benefit society and saddle many students with mountains of debt, so it’s time to strip tax-free status and use endowments it to pay off student loans. Since a quarter of Harvard freshman have used counselors, they are conformist hollow shells of achievement for achievement’s sake. No wonder they become so lost and unhappy when they enter the real world. Of course, people should have the freedom to pursue what they want in a free society with a free market. It takes two to tango with willing sellers and buyers of services like Crimson’s. Problems arise when they take positions of power and foist their misery on the rest of us.
Beaton based his program on his own experience. Born in Auckland and raised by a single mother, he began what he calls his “brutal pilgrimage” from the bottom of the planet to the top of the academic hierarchy by connecting to the handful of his countrymen who earned admission to Ivy League schools. He reverse engineered their process. His goal was to be “the most qualified high-school student in New Zealand,” he said. He earned straight A’s on a class load roughly 2½ times the size of a typical student’s. He started two businesses—a free newspaper distributed at cafes and a business selling iPhone stands for cars. He also held a part-time job at a fast-food restaurant. When he recognized he couldn’t rise to the very top of an activity—such as piano, tennis or the math Olympiad—he switched to something else. He earned national acclaim in debate and engineering competitions.
Beaton’s strategy was to invest the least effort into the greatest number of arenas and rise to the top of the hierarchy in the shortest time. He aimed to validate his success in tournaments and competitions. Eventually, Beaton was accepted at 25 colleges including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Columbia, Cambridge University and Duke University. Word of his success earning admission to the world’s best universities spread across New Zealand and prompted calls from families who wanted to know his secret. When 230 people came to hear him speak at the end of his senior year he recognized he had stumbled into a business opportunity.
A heartwarming tale of a hobbit from the Shire chasing the ring of status into Mordor. The chip on his shoulder must be larger than New Zealand itself. He could not resist the Eye of Sauron. Destroy it! Throw it in the fire! What are you waiting for? Just let it go, Mr. Frodo!
WSJ was not subtle in camera angle of this photo. The alpha Tiger looms over his beta boy mentee. Jamie has a Macron-style Napoleonic complex. He should marry his fellow Kiwi Jacinda Ardern to complete the globalist takeover of New Zealand.
Beaton received $40,000 in financial aid to attend Harvard and immediately began hiring classmates to help tutor the student clients he had acquired back home. During spring break freshman year, he traveled to Abu Dhabi and Dubai, home to a concentration of families with children enrolled in private schools, to scout the market and determine whether Crimson would work there. Families who have worked with Beaton described him as affable, earnest and able to navigate the cutthroat tactics necessary to succeed in elite college admissions. He has a mop of brown hair, a slight frame and a style that is more tech support than tech tycoon. His knowledge of university programs and admissions practices is encyclopedic, and his “just the facts” demeanor steadies the nerves of anxious parents, clients said.
At Harvard, Beaton took an accelerated academic track in applied mathematics to earn his undergraduate degree in three years and his masters in his fourth year. He didn’t attend a single party at Harvard or a Harvard-Yale football game. He worked through weekends and vacations. “I didn’t want to lie on a beach,” he said. By his sophomore year his company had revenue north of $1 million. He didn’t reapply for aid. While an undergraduate, Beaton commuted every Thursday to Manhattan to work as an analyst at Tiger Management. Julian Robertson became one of Crimson’s first investors. Beaton later attended Yale Law School. He took classes with Prof. Amy Chua, who in 2011 published “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” which examined competitive parenting.
More tech support than tech tycoon - another not so subtle burn. One day Jamie will look back and wish he spent spring break and weekends making friends and going to parties like a normal human being. You can’t get that time back. He is following in the footsteps of Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates, fellow Harvard alums who spend the rest of their lives trying to control people who they fundamentally don’t understand. Like them, he understood where to find markets gushing with money. Fun fact - Yale Tiger Mom Amy Chua mentored Vivek Ramaswamy and JD Vance.
Pressures on students have increased significantly since then, she said, and so has the backlash against it. She called Beaton an exceptional student with an underdog mentality who seemed slightly out of sync with the mostly extroverted progressive students she teaches. “He really is like the pure believer in what we might call the American dream, he just really believes in agency and self-help and meritocracy,” Chua said. “There is no ambivalence.”
Critics say the Wall Street-backed college counselors are preying on the anxieties of well-to-do families desperate to get their children into elite schools. Admissions deans say they can actually do more harm than good. Authenticity in an application is critical, said Mark Dunn, a senior associate director for outreach and recruitment at Yale. Hiring an enrollment counselor can work against a student if an application seems “overly engineered,” he wrote in an email. “We encounter many applications that present to the admissions committee as just a long list of accomplishments, with no sense of the dynamic adolescent behind them,” he said. “We admit people, not accomplishments!”
Beaton said 52 Crimson clients were accepted at Penn to begin this fall. Whitney Soule, dean of admissions, declined to comment on that figure or specifically on Crimson’s work, but expressed wariness at claims made by the industry. Admission decisions depend on the needs of the university and the various programs they are trying to fill, she said. From the outside, that isn’t knowable. “You can’t figure this out,” she said, of the notion that the admission process can be decoded. “It’s about the specificity of what we need. And nobody from the outside can anticipate that.”
Beaton’s version of meritocracy is the attractive cousin of DEI. On one extreme, rich people spend obscene amounts of money to give their kids an edge. On the other, commissars sneak affirmative action into every step up the ladder to people who are out of their depth. 90% of the population gets none of these benefits. The admissions officers are spewing word salad to hide thir cronyism. Our entire society is geared towards fake it til you make it, not authenticity.
Some critics said Crimson’s success is exaggerated because its student clients are highly motivated and already at the top in academics and activities, and would likely be among the students to get into Ivy Leagues anyway. One admissions official said the chances of many of those students being admitted, with or without Crimson, “are probably pretty high.” Beaton likened his assessment of the university admission criteria to Wall Street analysts scouring data sources to understand the inner workings of companies. “The universities may wish to believe none of this is studyable or analyzable,” he said. “But through a combination of information on faculty hiring, information on the ratios of department faculty to students, admissions rates by major… we’re able to provide good counsel.”
He added that there is nothing special about college admissions that makes it immune from preparation and training. Just as athletes see results in their performance with coaches, so do students applying to universities. “There’s a great history of institutions seeking to pretend that you cannot train for their processes. For example, at one point, people used to say you couldn’t train for the SAT,” Beaton said. “But in the same way you can train for sports and the same way you can improve your mathematics with high dosage tutoring, of course you can improve things that are important parts of your application.”
Correlation is causation when enough money is involved. The Wall Streetification of education continues. High dosage tutoring sounds like an “enhanced interrogation” torture technique at Guantanamo Bay.
Some Crimson families, meanwhile, are sensitive to the optics of hiring a private counselor. One father from Massachusetts whose eighth-grade son works with a Crimson tutor sang the praises of the company but asked that the family not to be identified because the parents didn’t want the accomplishments of their son diminished. “We don’t want people to think he didn’t do these things himself,” the father said.
Data from the Crimson applications accepted at Ivy Leagues have refined Beaton’s understanding of what it takes to get in. The average score on advanced-placement exams was 4.8 out of 5. The accepted students took an average of 8.4 AP classes—and those admitted to Harvard, Yale and Princeton took an average of 10.1 AP classes. The average SAT score for an Ivy acceptance was 1568, and grades were as close to perfect as possible. A’s and A minuses are acceptable, but “B’s are bombs,” Beaton said. Beaton said he advises students to aim for 10 activities connected across one or two themes, and that at least one should have a social-justice component. Leadership falls into two categories, institutional positions such as captain of sports teams or class president, and entrepreneurial positions.
Joining a social justice activity to pad your resume for Harvard is peak 2024. The anon father would happily call his buddy up to give his nepo baby a job, but we don’t want people to think he didn’t do these things himself! I saw many admissions files with handwritten notes from development officers adding “context” about how certain applicants had connections to certain trustees and megadonors. The VIP section has always and will always exist. Beaton will beat the B’s out of kids. Greta should work for Crimson as a social justice activity advisor. She has already moved on to the latest current thing - how dare you!
One Crimson example: A student started a podcast series in which he interviewed economists from around the world. The show became so popular he received solicitations from universities to highlight their professors. Good teacher recommendations aren’t good enough. Teachers should highlight that a student is exceptional, ideally among the most remarkable the teacher has taught in their career. Crimson offers strategies to elicit recommendations of that caliber. About one third of Crimson students hit all the marks, and they have the strongest chance of earning admission into a top university, Beaton said. Crimson likes to start working with students at age 11 to build their study and time management skills before high school begins.
Sarah Tierney is a platinum strategist at Crimson, which means she works with the company’s highest paying students and is the hub for clients—their primary point of contact who draws out their interests and sets their projects in motion. One of her students has 23 tutors helping her on academic subjects and test preparation. The student is also writing a novel, editing an essay for a competitive journal and working on a research paper that looks at the linguistic patterns in Taylor Swift songs. Tierney graduated from Harvard and has an M.B.A. from Northwestern. Her son just graduated from Harvard, which she said gives her tremendous credibility with clients, especially in Asia—since getting into the school is much harder now than a generation ago.
Status seeking starts before puberty for these poor kids. In Sarah’s case, it was seeded in her son’s amniotic fluid. Platinum strategist sounds like the VIP section of a strip club. Her student with 23 tutors while analyzing Taylor Swift songs will probably have a nervous breakdown by sophomore year. The Asians are following her AWFL multigenerational mimesis and neuroticism. Ironically, Harvard is one of many universities that teach courses on Tay Tay.
She and other strategists brainstorm with students to generate ideas for projects and then find experts to help execute them—what employees compare to companies hiring consultants to help their businesses run more efficiently. Sometimes Tierney works as her students’ public relations agent to help generate publicity for something they did, since media coverage can help set applications apart. “You’ve got to be able to differentiate yourself, whether that’s through a unique family circumstance, or unique research or unique interest, such that you break through the competitive clutter,” she said.
Two Romanian immigrants from California said they hired Crimson to help their son after a long search. They had both been raised with high expectations from their families to excel at school. They are now both successful professionals living in Los Gatos, a wealthy town in Silicon Valley, and want to push their eighth-grader as far as possible but not too far, said Daniela Ielceanu. “For us, education is critical,” she said. “It has helped us cross class lines. It has given us everything.”
What a depressing conclusion. If more kids get PR agents, more of them will have serious issues like Britney Spears and the Mickey Mouse Club. The Silicon Valley Romanians should know that the average Harvard administrator is to the left of Nicolae Ceaușescu. Full circle moment when their kid gets subjected to Maoist struggle sessions on campus, only one generation removed from them escaping Communism. Harvard Yard is the new Iron Curtain.
Crimson’s word salad commercial:
For the rest of Yuri’s How To Get Into Harvard guides, check out the Homeschooling section or the links below:
“Full circle moment when their kid gets subjected to Maoist struggle sessions on campus, only one generation removed from them escaping Communism”
True story. My parents escaped Hungarian communism, were so proud to see their son go to Harvard, my history 101 class freshman year was taught by a Stalinist who said the holodomor never happened. F all those people. Ps Vivek was my classmate. You’d be surprised by how counterproductively radicalizing the constant leftist groupthink can be…
So basically he culturally appropriated the Tiger Moms' approach, and slapped a ridiculous price on it (because everyone knows whatever costs more is better, Marketing 101). Here, status-conscious parents, I'll save you 200K:
-Be black
-Be a victim
-Publish a memoir of being a tween communist at your high-performing private school for black communists of means
-Be Angry, Very Angry about everything, all the time, and make videos to document your Anger (Greta Thunberg is getting old, after all)
Boom! Pick your Ivy.
You're welcome!