Jamie Beaton, CEO of educational consulting company Crimson Education, has a staggering nine university degrees from some of the world’s top universities.
Growing up in an academic environment and raised by a single mother who also holds multiple degrees, the 29-year-old’s exposure to global learning opportunities led him to aim for an Ivy League education after high school in New Zealand.
His experience navigating the complex application process for these schools, consisting of multiple essays and the need to showcase various qualities, led him to start his own firm when he was still studying at Harvard to help guide other students along the path towards matriculating at Ivy League universities.
But it wasn’t enough being a young entrepreneur — Jamie wanted to study more, and more. He continued his education at various top universities in the US and UK.
Before he knew it, the 29-year-old had already collected an Infinity Gauntlet’s worth of degrees, and he is currently doing a degree in War History.
Earlier this year, a user on X posted Jamie’s education history and it went viral for being “the most absurd education history of all time on LinkedIn”.
Source: Nikhil Basu Trivedi on X
While Jamie does not advocate that people get as many degrees as he does, calling his learning approach “extreme”, he does believe he has cracked the code for getting into a top university and mentors a wide array of students through his own company, Crimson Education.
Image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
MS News spoke to Jamie in a wide-ranging interview discussing his upbringing, experiences in getting into and obtaining degrees from some of the top universities globally, and his opinions of Singapore’s education system.
Born in New Zealand and raised by a single mother, Jamie admits that his upbringing had much more in common with Asian culture than with his fellow Kiwis, who are generally known for their laid-back attitude.
For example, at the age of five, he was enrolled in a tuition academy with around 200 Chinese students, and he was the only non-Chinese person there. However, Jamie said he “felt at home” there.
From a very young age, Jamie loved learning and showed enthusiasm in a wide range of subjects. Winning a written language prize for English at age seven helped Jamie decide on a path of academics.
Image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
“From there, I began to really treat the classroom the same way most Kiwi students treat the rugby field, or cricket pitch,” he noted.
Initially, Jamie planned on staying in New Zealand and studying medicine at the University of Auckland.
However, things changed when he met a senior from his school attending Yale University and a conversation with the older alumnus opened him up to the possibility of studying abroad.
“I was 13, and he said, ‘Hey, Jamie, you should think about applying to these global schools,” Jamie recalled. “So from age 13 to 18, I shifted my focus to really building a strong profile for these global universities.”
To this end, Jamie stacked his high school curriculum, taking the unusual step of completing high school at age 17 with a whopping 10 A-levels.
His experience is not so different from many top Singaporean students who take nine or 10 A-level subjects as well, but it is not the norm in New Zealand, where most students take three or four A-levels.
But this would prove advantageous when it came to the application process. When Jamie then applied to all of the Ivy League schools as well as Oxbridge, he got accepted into all of them.
For anyone who’s ever examined the application process, that is a skill unto itself and is one many parents and students can only dream of.
However, Jamie’s results were just as he had planned since his teenage years, and after much deliberation with his family, he opted to enrol at Harvard and pursue a Bachelor’s degree in Applied Mathematics and Economics.
Even before leaving for the US, Jamie thought he could share the process he’d gone through by mentoring other New Zealand students who wished to follow in his footsteps — and Crimson Education was born.
Because Jamie had taken so many A-levels in high school, he managed to skip several classes and graduated from Harvard aged just 20 — completing a five-year degree in merely three.
Image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
He had chosen Harvard because of his strong interest in economics, finance, and the study of government, as well as the Harvard faculty’s strength compared to other Ivy League schools.
Though Oxford and Cambridge were among his options, students are required to pick a degree and focus on that throughout their undergraduate years. Jamie felt more strongly about having a well-rounded education, which he could get at Harvard.
“Harvard’s got majors like folklore, mythology, English, philosophy, all the way to math and economics that I took,” he said.
Image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
But he wasn’t done there. While working on his business, he was already planning his next degree — a Master’s in Business Administration (MBA) at Stanford.
“My mother had done an MBA, and I thought it made a lot of sense to get one too, because I love business and finance,” Jamie said.
He felt studying at Stanford would also help equip him with the skills he needed to be a business owner and young founder. At this point, Crimson Education already had about 70 full-time staff, and he wanted to become a better CEO.
Never one to miss out on an opportunity to learn more, Jamie combined his MBA with a Master’s in Education, which is commonly referred to as a MA/MBA programme. He described the education school at Stanford as “one of the best in the world”.
After a year’s break from school, Jamie jumped back into academia and came out with a double Master’s, graduating in 2019.
Many students, those in Singapore included, believe they simply need to score well in their exams to enter a top university but this couldn’t be further from the truth.
“When you’re trying to get into one of the world’s best universities, you need to, what I call, break the box in terms of the age around high school,” Jamie explained. “To get into the world’s best schools, you have to be an innovator. Often, you’ve got to often pursue more subjects, begin early, take university courses, take areas outside of the traditional high school curriculum.”
“I learned things in fields like development economics and game theory back when I was in high school. And you don’t normally learn that in your traditional high school economics curriculum.”
Beyond that, to get into these top schools particularly in America — such as Harvard and Yale — you often have to pursue leadership projects and initiatives. One student with Crimson Education ran his own economics podcast, interviewing various professors, entrepreneurs, and media folks.
Another founded a project aiming to raise money for Aboriginal students to go on choir programmes around the world.
All of these initiatives have one thing in common: They illustrate leadership and initiative in running a project as a teenager.
On top of all that, there are the extracurriculars such as competitions and summer programmes, as well as a vast array of essays that had to display creativity.
Jamie himself professed that he was not much of a leader when he was in high school. “I had experience with starting initiatives, but I wasn’t a very strong public speaker. I wasn’t the kind of guy who could rally a crowd or audience, get them fired up about something,” he said.
However, he knew after researching the application process for the top universities that he’d have to display his skills in some way — ones that were different and distinctive. Jamie felt one of these skills was in taking 10 A-levels, which he believed would give him an advantage and be difficult for others to replicate.
He was no traditional leader either, but knew he could create initiatives and projects in issues he cared deeply about. One of them was “Don’t Stand By, Stand Up”, which targeted alcoholism among those in high school and sought to support them. It was something he’d seen affect many of his peers.
This formed his strategy for his applications.
I leaned into things where I had unique perspectives and I wanted to find a way to showcase those passions I had and have a real impact.
The successful applications gave Jamie the validation that his approach worked, and so he began to work with more students, tuning his methods with each mentorship. This formed the basis for Crimson.
Starting Crimson made Jamie realise he had to continue learning and evolving his leadership skills. He did this through several methods, including modeling how “amazing leaders” such as American investor Julian Robertson and former New Zealand Prime Minister John Key connect to people emotionally and how they rally a team.
He said he has also received coaching through his schools as well as via interactions with investors and advisors he met as the founder of Crimson, along with other initiatives like psychometric assessments.
Even now, Jamie admits he wouldn’t call his leadership skills a particular strength of his, but that “it’s always a work in progress” and that it has improved since his high school days.
Although Jamie’s motivations to study came from an innate desire to learn, one cannot say it was a walk in the park to get into Harvard, or indeed, to take his A-levels — even if he eventually did well.
Growing up, his grandfather was a key role model in his life along with his single mum. However, things took a turn when Jamie’s grandmother fell ill and passed away when he was in high school.
Amidst the fallout of her death, Jamie had to step up to be a support figure to his grandfather — a contrast to the support system his granddad had provided previously.
Many of the family issues Jamie faced were during his last year of high school, while he was preparing all of his applications to the various top universities, and taking seven A-levels in school at the same time.
“My last year in high school was for sure the most stressful year of my life — more stressful than any Ivy League school, more stressful than Wall Street, or building Crimson, and all of that, honestly, has been easier compared to [my last year of high school],” Jamie mused.
But it was in that pressure-cooker environment that Jamie said he really had to dig deep and developed grit to go through with everything that was happening at the same time.
Jamie at his high school graduation with his family. Image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
Jamie also had to deal with being away from his family when he first went to America for university.
An only child, Jamie was used to being part of a family unit that he said fully supported his goals.
Although he loved Harvard’s environment, where he got to meet lifelong friends and mentors, it was still a fresh start for him, with no family or network in America. Additionally, there were some cultural differences between himself, a Kiwi, and how Americans behaved.
And that was before even talking about his undergraduate curriculum, which he managed at a high level on top of building Crimson as well as working as an analyst for a hedge fund, Tiger Management, at just age 19.
To still graduate in three years doing all that is difficult to fathom. Just thinking about it induces fatigue.
“I was really stretching myself to the hilt to get through all of those things and hit all of my obligations to a high level,” Jamie said. “I would say time management there was, of course, really intense and challenging, but, man, was it fun.”
“Fun” might not be the word one would normally use to describe what was frankly an insane schedule while getting through school, working at a company and then building one on the side at the same time.
Despite the crazy schedules it took to make his work, work — it has not quelled Jamie’s desire to keep going back to school despite his work.
To date, Jamie holds a total of nine degrees, each selected based on wanting to improve as an entrepreneur and leader, understand more about the education sector, or learn more about global and public policy.
Image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
After completing his MA/MBA at Stanford, Jamie wasted no time in continuing his studies, being awarded the Rhodes Scholarship in 2017 to complete a Doctorate of Philosophy in Public Policy as a Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. He graduated in 2020.
He also holds various other degrees in other Ivy League and top universities, including a Juris Doctor in Law at Yale Law School, a Master in Finance at Princeton University, a Master of Science in Education Entrepreneurship at the University of Pennsylvania, and a Masters in Global Affairs at Tsinghua University.
And he’s not stopping anytime soon — when MS News spoke to him, he said he was pursuing a degree in military studies from King’s College London — his first history degree.
“I was inspired [to pick up this field] by a guy I went to Yale Law School with, who was a tank commander in the military,” Jamie related. “Hearing the way he talked about military strategy and military operations, I thought there’s probably a lot of good insights to be learned from this domain that applies to other arenas, like business, for example.”
Jamie also wanted to study history in a formal setting as he found it tells a lot about humankind.
“A lot of the time, wars and conflicts tell you a lot about humankind and the good, the bad, and the ugly sides of it, mainly the bad and the ugly,” he said. “It felt like an interesting degree to pursue and I’ve been really enjoying that.”
Having worked with numerous Singaporean students at Crimson, Jamie can say that they are among the best and brightest young folk, who possess some unique advantages.
They have one of the world’s best academic systems, period. And the average SAT score in Singapore is one of the highest in the world.
According to at least one website, Singapore has an average SAT score of 1250 as compared to other countries’ scores that range between 1060 and 1200.
It means that Singaporean students are normally already meeting some of the baseline requirements for a lot of top schools with that rigorous training, he added.
However, what they typically lack are projects in the leadership space, and they usually do not have enough extracurriculars.
“They often haven’t done enough summer programs and occasionally, students can struggle with the creative aspects of the application essay process.”
Jamie also noted that the Singapore system might “encourage students to approach their academics in quite a formulaic way”, and they might require mentorship to figure out what they will do outside of school and balance their time, giving the high-intensity pressure testing culture that exists here.
One of his students who got into Stanford after several years had to balance “insane athletic pursuits” alongside his academics and extracurriculars.
Additionally, although the Singapore system “certainly is one of the more stressful”, he acknowledged the government has taken a lot of steps in recent years to begin to evolve and reform some of the high-stakes testing culture.
In fact, Jamie asserted that Singapore isn’t just high-intensity, but also an “education innovator”.
“[Singapore is] a place that many global countries would be dying to replicate or emulate,” Jamie said.
“Tiger parents” are not unique to Singapore, with many who place a huge emphasis on their children’s education — often micromanaging their schedule and making them attend various classes outside of school.
And that’s not even mentioning the barrage of tuition classes.
Jamie does not see this as a bad thing, but acknowledges parenting and parenting intensity can be a double-edged sword.
“There are many countries where parents don’t place a large academic emphasis or set expectations at home, and in my experience, that’s actually worse most of the time,” he said.
A relaxed high school environment might result in the child facing difficulties when they go to university, losing opportunities because they haven’t really experienced the pressure that comes with the working world and being an adult.
At the same time, parents can’t take it too far either. “A lot of parents have seen Singapore going through a profound transformation over the past 30 to 40 years, and that education has transformed their world — it has the capacity to transform their child’s too.”
Much of this pressure comes from a position of a sense of obligation to the next generation and a sense for their child to do well.
To be sure, some of it can be unhealthy, and Jamie believes that parents need not put arbitrary pressure on their child.
Instead, they can support their child by setting high goals and then getting behind them emotionally, while allowing external mentors to support their pursuits.
“I think when the roles become blurred, of the parent as the educator and the parent as the cheerleader and the parent as sort of the source of discipline, that’s when things can get a little bit stressful and it can create quite a tense relationship,” Jamie said.
“I put myself under a lot of pressure, but my family played that role of supporting me and being an emotional pillar for me and handling those intense years. That’s quite powerful.”
Jamie might be a big proponent of education, but this doesn’t mean he advocates that everyone should do what he does — he admits his learning style is ”very extreme and highly unusual”. Indeed, his list of degrees going viral is proof that what he does isn’t the norm.
It forms part of a “balanced diet of learning”, from academics to mentoring, to operating experience, to advisors, to coaches and experiences from building Crimson, Jamie said.
“For me, it works. Is it right for everyone? Probably not.”
But he thinks most students can benefit from his learning journey and if anything, he hopes it inspires people just to keep learning.
Also read: Li Shengwu announces tenure at Harvard University, Lee Hsien Yang has proud dad moment
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Featured image courtesy of Jamie Beaton.
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