Early in the fall semester of the 2025-26 academic year, Lisa Belkin, an adjunct professor at Columbia University’s journalism school, realized that one of her students, Jamie Beaton, had yet to show up for class.
Belkin, who avoids combing the internet for information about her students, knew nothing about Beaton. She was curious about his absence, though, so she reached out to a dean, who sent an email.
Beaton was apologetic in his reply, saying he had mixed up his schedule. He was in New Zealand, teaching a course in entrepreneurship at the University of Auckland, but would be back in New York the next week.
That was when Belkin decided to break her rule. Who was this guy?
Beaton, she learned, had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard in 2016, picking up a master’s degree in applied mathematics along the way. He had gone on to collect an M.B.A. from Stanford. Then a law degree from Yale. That was followed by a doctor of philosophy in public policy from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar — all before age 28.
Attending classes remotely and in person, he earned additional master’s degrees from — deep breath — the University of Pennsylvania (education entrepreneurship), Stanford (education technology), Princeton (finance), Cornell (health care policy and economics), Dartmouth (implementation science), King’s College London (war studies) and Tsinghua University in Beijing (global affairs).
Still, there was more: Beaton, who was born and raised in New Zealand, was a founder and the chief executive of Crimson Education, a college admissions counseling service that has been valued at more than $600 million.
A week after his apologetic reply, Beaton made his first appearance in Belkin’s classroom. As the semester went on, he did not miss an assignment.
“He was a joy to get to know,” Belkin said. “But it was also the weirdest relationship I’ve ever had with a student.”
‘Passions and Curiosities’
A 5-foot-6 personification of naked ambition whose LinkedIn profile has been the subject of memes and Reddit threads, Beaton has gone to the head of a rarefied class — perpetual students.
If he continues collecting advanced degrees at such a swift pace, he will surpass Benjamin B. Bolger, who has racked up 16 at age 50. He might even beat Michael Nicholson, an octogenarian forever scholar with more than 30 degrees to his name.
Away from his studies, Beaton, 31, has become a player in the field of college admissions counseling. His clients pay between $30,000 and $200,000 for a multiyear program designed to enhance their children’s chances of getting into top universities.
His own academic background has raised some questions, starting with: How can this be real? Is it education as performance art? An elaborate marketing ploy for his business?
The truth, Beaton said, is more prosaic.
“The first five degrees had a clear skill acquisition component to them,” he said. “Since then, it’s really been about following different passions and curiosities.”
We met on a recent afternoon in Manhattan, not far from where he lives with his wife, Priscilla Beaton. His day was crowded with appointments, including an evening event at the Harvard Club in Midtown, where he and his Crimson Education colleagues would hold a meet-and-greet with potential clients.
“I love the action, and I love a jam-packed day,” he said. “It’s good fun.”
So many things are, according to Beaton, “good fun.” An abridged list: Helping students decode the college admissions process. Studying the viability of distressed companies. Grabbing snacks in the Amtrak cafe car. Reading big books in one gulp. Riding the fastest roller coaster in the world on a recent trip to Saudi Arabia.
He was cheerful and accommodating. He spoke rapidly, in fully formed paragraphs. Shortly before we met, he emailed me a 61-page legal notice stating that Crimson Education had initiated a $28 million hostile takeover of Kip McGrath, an international tutoring provider.
He keeps up with his studies even while traveling the world on business. A few weeks ago, he was in India when he submitted his end-of-semester project for a course at Brown, where he is working toward a master’s in data science. He said he tries to get six hours of sleep a night.
“Oh, he’s lying,” John Key, a former prime minister of New Zealand, said in a telephone interview.
Key, the chairman of Crimson Education, considers Beaton the second-brightest New Zealander, behind the noted scientist Ernest Rutherford, who died nearly 90 years ago.
“And I’m only saying that because it’s hard to take it away from the guy who split the atom,” Key said.
Amy Chua, the author of “Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother,” a 2011 memoir about her hard-driving parenting style, was one of Beaton’s professors at Yale Law School. In recent years she has written more letters of recommendation for him than she can count.
“He can’t stop applying to things,” she said.
She acknowledged that his story sounds apocryphal.
“Jamie is so unusual that I wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had said to me, ‘Oh, he invented the whole thing — he doesn’t even have a mother,’” Chua said.
‘I Want to Work’
The making of the boy who wanted to know everything began in Auckland, New Zealand, where he was the only child of a single mother, Paula Beaton. She was pregnant when she and Jamie’s father separated, she said. They later divorced.
Jamie, who took his mother’s surname, recalled “odd experiences” when he was young, like when his mother joined him for father-son breakfasts at his primary school. But family was important — his maternal grandparents, John and Sarah Beaton, lived with them — and so was education. Jamie’s grandfather, a tradesman, always seemed to be leafing through a newspaper or an Andy McNab thriller.
“Academics was our religion,” Jamie said.
His mother said that one of her goals had been to expose her son to myriad opportunities. So he played tennis and basketball. He went camping, swimming, kayaking. He was 9 when his mother introduced him to a chess coach named Glenn Harry Kwok. Kwok and Paula soon began dating and are now long-term partners.
“I wondered why we weren’t doing much chess,” Jamie said.
His mother chauffeured him to tutoring centers and hired academic coaches, which was unusual for a middle-class family in New Zealand.
“We wouldn’t be getting new cars or anything like that,” Paula Beaton said. “Everything revolved around education, and we didn’t see it as a sacrifice.”
As a teenager, Jamie dreamed of attending a top college in the United States. In his final year of high school, he took more than twice the number of required courses. He was admitted to 25 universities, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton.
Before leaving home, he co-founded the counseling service that would become Crimson Education, billing it as a way to help international students navigate their way to U.S. universities. After all, he had done it himself.
At Harvard, he felt all alone at first. Then he joined 15 student organizations, including the debate club and the undergraduate economics association. Brett Davis, one of Beaton’s roommates at Harvard, grew accustomed to his 2 a.m. business calls.
“That was certainly a clue that this guy was thinking beyond the script of what is normal to do or achieve in college,” Davis said.
Beaton was a sophomore when he emailed Julian Robertson, the founder of Tiger Management, a Wall Street hedge fund. Following a practice he had used with other traders at his firm, Robertson sent him off to be evaluated by a psychoanalyst — “Good fun,” Beaton said — before bringing him aboard.
Between classes at Harvard, Beaton spent two days a week at the Tiger Management offices in New York. Robertson, who died in 2022, and his son Alex, who now runs the firm, became mentors. Tiger Management was an early investor in Crimson Education.
Alex Robertson recalled urging Beaton to have more work-life balance: Why not spend a week in Cancún with his buddies? “Honestly, Alex,” Beaton told him, “I can’t think of anything worse than sitting on a beach for five days when I want to work.”
Beaton was among the dozens of students who took a class on entrepreneurship taught by David Ager, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. Beaton stood out, not only because of his prominent spot in the amphitheater — “In the front, three rows up,” Ager said — but also because he was such an active participant.
“I say this with love,” Ager said, “but I’m sure there was a little bit of frustration that he had to share the time with other people.”
Throughout his journey, Beaton has juggled academics and business. Belkin, the professor at Columbia’s journalism school, recalled that he often had his laptop open during class to check work emails or his stock portfolio. “Yet everything came in on time,” Belkin said.
Beaton was multitasking in other ways, too, often talking with the student seated next to him, Priscilla Putzer. “There was a lot of whispering and giggling,” Belkin said.
Beaton and Putzer were married in April at a ceremony on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif.
A Company Grows
Crimson Education has not been immune from criticism. Early on, it faced pushback for using aggressive sales tactics and employing many college students as tutors and counselors.
As the company grew, Beaton said, it shifted to employing more full-time counselors — the company now has 1,200 full-time staff members, he said — and hired an accounting firm to vet its numbers. Of the 10,000 students who have used its services, more than 2,000 have been accepted by Ivy League universities, Stanford or the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he said.
The company has also found itself the subject of a broader critique — that its high price tag effectively self-selects students who already have a good chance of getting into elite universities.
Jeff Selingo, a journalist who has written several books about college admissions, said that private counselors can be a helpful resource for those who can afford them. “But it’s not going to get you into a place that you can’t get into otherwise,” he said.
Hamish Coates, an education expert at the Australian National University and Beaton’s thesis adviser at Tsinghua University, praised Beaton as someone who understood “the power of higher education.” But Coates posed a hypothetical: “Do you really want your child to be grooming themselves for the Ivy League from the age of 5, when 95 percent fail to get in? Or are you better off doing some finger painting, reading ‘Frog and Toad’ and having a good life?”
Beaton has heard that argument before — the “pressure-cooker environment” on one side and the “chill, happy childhood” on the other. He doesn’t buy the premise. “The students who try harder in high school are often the happiest and most engaged,” he said.
His own future appears to be a work in progress. For now, he said, he is focused on “education and entrepreneurship,” along with starting a family. But several of his friends said they could see him entering politics. He has worked with New Zealand’s center-right National Party, which was once headed by Key.
“If you said to me, ‘In 35 years’ time, Jamie will still be the C.E.O. of Crimson,’ I don’t see it,” Key said. “I think he’s got other, bigger things that he’s going to move on to.”
At the end of his busy day, Beaton and his Crimson Education colleagues met with teenagers and their parents in a wood-paneled room of the Harvard Club. As servers passed around hors d’oeuvres, he stood before the group as a living advertisement for his company, the one-time whiz kid who had beaten the system.
At one point Beaton ceded the stage to a colleague who spoke about scholarships available to high school students, including the John Locke essay competition.
“How many are familiar with John Locke?” she asked.
A single hand shot up from the front row.
“Not you, Jamie,” she said.
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