How to Cross Class Lines?

"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 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.

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 class of 2028 at several 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 was 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 paper or starting a podcast.

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.

At the top end is Beaton, whose 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Beaton based his program on his own experience. Born in Auckland and raised by a single mother, he connected to the handful of his countrymen who earned admission to Ivy League schools and 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 2 1/2 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 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.

Beaton was accepted at 25 colleges including Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford.

Word of his success prompted calls from families who wanted to know his secret. He recognized he had stumbled into a business opportunity.

Beaton received $40,000 in financial aid to attend Harvard and 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 to scout the market.

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.

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.

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 said.

"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 programs they are trying to fill, she said. From the outside, that isn't knowable. "You can't figure this out," she said.

Some critics said Crimson's success is exaggerated because its students are highly motivated and already at the top in academics and activities, and would likely be among those accepted to Ivy Leagues anyway.

Beaton likened his assessment of the admission criteria to Wall Street analysts scouring data 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.

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.

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.

One Crimson example: A student started a podcast 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 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. 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 in California said they hired Crimson to help their son. They are 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."" [1]

1. The Guru Saying He Can Get Your 11-Year-Old Into Harvard --- Jamie Beaton offers a pricey, yearslong boot camp preparing kids to apply to the Ivy League, drawing parents -- and Wall Street. Belkin, Douglas.  Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 17 Oct 2024: A.1.