Why The WSJ's Views On College Consulting Deserve Your Attention
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Crimson Education was started by Jamie Beaton in Auckland, New Zealand in 2013. At 18, Beaton applied to 25 of the world’s best universities and received an offer from all of them — attending Harvard as an undergraduate student, Stanford for his MBA, and then Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar where he where he is completing a DPhil in Public Policy**.**
In his last year of high school, with little knowledge as to ‘how the whole thing worked’, Beaton negotiated the complex US and UK applications processes — working on the premise that ‘more is more’ (for example, he completed 10 A Levels compared to the average 3-4). After gaining admission to Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, UPenn’s Wharton School of Business, Cambridge, Duke and a range of other top universities, he was inundated by queries from friends in New Zealand as to how this was possible, and started advising other students on ‘how to get in’.
These local queries saw the birth of Crimson Education, the company’s goal (which has remained unchanged since those early days in 2013) being to support students in gaining admission to the world’s best universities regardless of their place of birth. Beaton’s aim was to remove the barrier of geography and level the playing field of top university admissions, while also educating students as to the plethora of academic and professional opportunities beyond their own backyards.
Fast forward almost 8 years and Beaton, now 26, leads the most successful admissions support company in the world with Crimson students now gaining admission to the world Top 20 universities — including Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford MIT and more at up to 4x the general applicant rate.
Key to this success is the model on which Crimson works, and the people it employs — the former relating to a highly personalised process which supports students with every element of the complex US and UK application processes, and the latter referring to the 2,000+ Crimson tutors and mentors who are students at, or graduates from, the very institutions Crimson students are aiming for.
Beyond the expertise, Crimson has also invested heavily in the best education technology available - building proprietary platforms such as the Crimson App which drives a student’s application journey (timelines, tutor and mentor bookings and communication, practice papers, immediate feedback, parent communication, Crimson community interaction and more).
Typically Crimson students are teamed with approximately five personal experts who guide them on: building the best-fit university application list for them, creating and crafting resonating extracurricular projects, writing personal statements and supplemental essays that lift them above the fierce competition, and preparing them for the all-important admissions interviews (including Oxford and Cambridge).
This unique approach to admissions counselling has built a global community of Crimson students now based, in high numbers, at every Ivy League school, MIT, Stanford, Caltech, Duke, Northwestern, Johns Hopkins, Cambridge, Oxford, UCL, Imperial, King’s College London and many, many more.
Eight years into Beaton’s admissions support ‘project’ — the company since having attracted millions of dollars of investment from companies such as the world leading New York-based Tiger Global, the Hong Kong-based Chow Thai Fook (CTF) Education Group, Korean-based Solborn Investments and more — Crimson is making its mark on the global admissions landscape and in the world of online learning.
In late 2019 Crimson launched it’s global online high school, Crimson Global Academy (CGA) — it’s students from all around the world already performing way above global averages in the A Levels curriculum (with an average score of 93%).
Above all, Beaton and his co-founders, Sharndre Kushor and Fangzhou Jiang, along with the Crimson teams in 21 countries around the world, have had the honour and privilege of helping talented, hard working students reach their university admissions dreams. Being part of that journey is life changing for the student, their families and the support teams lucky enough to be part of their education/life journeys.
