Crimson Education Celebrates a Decade of Student Success

How It All Began

I am incredibly excited to announce our 10 year anniversary celebration at Crimson Education.

When I was 14, growing up in New Zealand, I sat on a train next to a boy called Ben who had just gotten into Yale. He told me about applying overseas and the potential it had to transform my life. I listened intently and quickly realized, this was it: this was the path I needed to go on. I spent much of my high school years challenging myself across academics, extracurriculars, leadership and beyond to be the best student I could be.

After getting into Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, Wharton, Columbia, Cambridge, Duke and over a dozen other universities, I chose Harvard and moved to the United States to begin the next chapter of my life. While there, as an undergraduate freshman, I launched Crimson to give the next generation of ambitious students the support and infrastructure they need to achieve their wildest dreams, starting with admissions into the world’s most prestigious universities.

I should say that I could never have imagined how Crimson would rapidly grow on the world stage, but honestly, I could see it, and we are now only scratching the surface. To me, it was obvious that there was so much ambition, potential and talent in so many students that was being extinguished, undermined or distorted by the current access to resources and mentorship all over the world.

Our central belief at Crimson is that there are millions of possibilities for how a student’s early life might play out. Our job is to make sure we put our students on the highest octane, most intense, most rewarding, most challenging path possible out of those millions of pathways so they can explode onto the world stage.

I was raised by my mother Paula. She was a single mother for much of my childhood and worked exceptionally hard to give me access to a wide variety of education resources. From scholarships to various local schools to a network of tutors across biology, chemistry, math, English, physics, French and the SAT, we worked hard as a family to make sure I was making use of every minute.

Crimson’s model has taken that early hodge-podge of tutors and mentors I surrounded myself with and turbocharged it to a remarkable level of personalization. Students around the world leveraging Crimson seamlessly draw on teams of the world’s smartest mentors, unique admissions data, research materials, and expert insights from the best universities and companies on the planet.

Our Obsession with Student Outcomes

The last 10 years of education adventures have been defined by an obsessive focus on our students. Today, Crimson sends more students to the Ivy League, Oxford, Cambridge, and the world’s best universities like Duke, Stanford, MIT, and Caltech than any other organization on the planet. In virtually every major admissions country, Crimson’s students dominate with their acceptances, from America to Singapore to Australia to England to China and beyond. 

Our students have now received over 950+ Ivy League offers and thousands of offers to Top 50 US colleges. Today, our students have worked at companies including OpenAI, DeepMind, Tesla, Waymo, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, Bain and Company, Boston Consulting Group, Blackstone, Warburg Pincus, KKR, Citadel, Hudson River Trading, Jane Street, Uber, Evercore, Vista Equity Partners, Meta (Facebook), Amazon, Man Group, Man AHL, Kirkland and Ellis, Paul Weiss, Lyft, Microsoft, Google, and Spark Capital.

They have gained admission into programs including Rhodes Scholarship, MIT PhD, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Business School, Stanford Business School, the Schwarzman Scholarship, and Y-Combinator One has already sold a company to Amazon Web Services and another was recently elected as a politician in the New Zealand National Government. It is incredible that many of these students from our earliest years of Crimson are now “adulting” and competing in the world’s best job markets. Crimson has grown exponentially and the waves of Crimson kids hitting the international job markets are surging. 

It is easy to look at a blur of the best universities and companies on the planet and forget that each and every single one of these pathways translates to an individual student who has walked a path of extreme ambition, hustle, intensity and focus to achieve these extraordinary results. 

The Decision to Enter the Arena

The journey to excellence for our students isn’t easy. To the contrary, it is often gut-wrenching and difficult. The journey is stressful, at times agonizing, and requires immense personal sacrifice. Many of our students have some sleepless nights and experience the giddy highs and the stomach-churning lows that come with putting yourself out to be judged and assessed by others. 

Theodore Roosevelt described in his famous quote “the man in the arena”.

Our Crimson students for a decade have been in the arena. They have ventured into the most competitive processes in the world and fought for opportunities: in medical schools, on Wall Street, in front of venture capitalists, in political campaigns, for social change, in front of the admissions committees of the most selective universities on the planet.

It is easy to disengage and say you don’t want to try and compete. It is easy to throw in the towel. Our Crimson students emerge from every corner of the world, from every socioeconomic background and with every kind of ambition and they stand in the arena.

I think about a young student Jade Sceats. She grew up in Kerikeri, New Zealand. She attended a public school with the challenged local curriculum NCEA. A fire was burning in her belly. She loved computer science and dreamed of unleashing her talents on the world stage. She took a courageous risk to jump into a fledgling online school, Crimson Global Academy initially as a part-time student.

After loving the intensity of the academics and the focus on global achievement, she joined full-time as one of the first 5 students. Fast forward to 2024, young Jade had been accepted into Princeton, Columbia and won a major scholarship to Vanderbilt. She has worked with intensity and fire for her whole schooling adventure and at many junctures, taken the path less traveled and now is set to thrive on the world stage.

Our People Make All the Difference

Crimson’s remarkable accomplishments and student success would never have been possible without the legends on our team who have worked intensively to support the ambitions of these students.

From our incredible co-founders Sharndre Kushor and Fangzhou Jiang who brought Crimson to life, to our passionate student success managers like Bethany Watson, to our remarkable strategists, the best in the world, who guide our kids to their wildest ambitions like Bob Fan and Abbigail Colwyn.

Our marketers like Jessica Silcock, Kim Scott, and Emily Smith have told the awe-inspiring stories of our students on the world stage and in doing so have triggered new students to realize this trajectory is possible.

Our early academic advisors such as Peter Kim, Guy Wallace and James Lee expanded our services and our heroic early country managers such as Soraya Behesti, Andrew Wooten, and Ed Matsuda brought Crimson totally global and and helped pave pathways for students from all corners of the world to gain acceptances to the most elite institutions.

Our engineering and product teams developed a proprietary technology platform that has revolutionized the application process and enabled our students to access an array of unique services, teams of specialists, and actionable data with thousands of successful common apps and profiles at their fingertips.

I could truly go on for hours expressing my gratitude and awe for the people here at Crimson who continually innovate in this field and obsess over the ways we can accelerate our students’ outcomes.

The Crimson Education Revolution

It has taken an epic and extraordinary team to build Crimson into the company we have today and we are just getting started. Our online high school, Crimson Global Academy, is just this year graduating our first co-hort of high school seniors and they are off to incredible universities such as Harvard, Stanford and MIT.

Over 80% of global IB students chose to study on our platform this year.

Our global admissions service just closed this recent application year with an industry record of prestigious offers; we now have 981 all-time Ivy admits, 1594 Ivy Plus, and 6230 to the US top 50.

We are revolutionizing education. Our approach is rooted in a deep-seated belief that education must be as dynamic and diverse as the students it serves. Aspiration should not be limited by geography or by access to information.

Our students get access to world-class tutors and mentors anywhere in the world, take classes at their own pace, learn asynchronously, and study based on their individual capabilities rather than age. And we will continue to inspire our students to dream big and be prepared to compete on the world stage.

Thank you for celebrating with us and here’s to our very bright future!

Jamie Beaton