Don't Force It: How to Get into College without Losing Yourself in the Process

Jamie Beaton: Comparing Systems of Higher Education

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In today’s episode, I sit down with Jamie Beaton, founder of Crimson Education. Jamie shares his impressive academic journey and dives into the complexities of college admissions.

Bio
Jamie has earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees at Harvard, as well as Master’s degrees at Stanford, UPenn, Princeton, and Tsinghua, a PhD at Oxford, and JD at Yale Law School. He has grown Crimson into the world’s most successful university admissions consultancy, having assisted thousands of students worldwide in gaining entry to the most competitive universities in the US and the UK. Follow Jamie on LinkedIn.

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Jamie Beaton:

I think it is a, it's a really challenging one, because it strikes the heart of, you know, should you have an all public education system? Should there be entrepreneurship and sort of for profit mechanisms at play in a kind of clean meritocracy? What's the role of coaching? You know, should there even be private schools or private tutors, or any of this stuff?

Sheila Akbar:

Hi folks, welcome back to the podcast today. I've got an old friend, Jamie Beaton on the podcast, and just a couple of weeks ago, he had a front page spread on the Wall Street Journal about his company, crimson education and the kind of work that they do. And of course, it's a huge success story. Jamie grew up in New Zealand, didn't have a lot of academic resources available to him, but absolutely took advantage of every opportunity he could find and made it to Harvard, and since then, has been collecting just the most impressive credentials and degrees and helping a lot of students through the college admissions process, both in the US and abroad. And I wanted to have him on the podcast, because he and I think about the college process in pretty different ways, but there are certainly things that we can agree on. So I think you'll find this conversation very interesting. I'll let you take a listen, and then we'll chat on the other side. Well, Jamie, thanks so much for joining me today. I'm excited for this conversation.

Jamie Beaton:

Me too. It's a real pleasure.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah. So I always like to start with your educational journey, your story. So I know you grew up in New Zealand. How did you decide to come to the States for college?

Jamie Beaton:

The first trigger that I can remember was picking up a book called what they teach you at Harvard Business School, at a second hand bookstore in the city called Hamilton in New Zealand. And I picked this up, and I'd sort of vaguely heard of Harvard and movies, and I read through this, you know, it was actually about the MBA experience, but it was still very captivating, this idea of this university full of, you know, ambition and different intellectual pursuits, all these exciting opportunities, guest speakers coming on campus, and a real energy about the place. Then a couple of years later, I was in a train out from my high school, sitting next to a boy called Ben cornfield, who was an American fellow had gone into Yale, and he said to me, Hey, Jamie, you know, you should really think about considering these overseas schools. So from age 13 to 18, I began really focusing on this wacky college missions process. But that was that was some of the key trigger moments. And probably the last thing that really got me fired up was visiting Columbia with my mum when I was 15, and that was probably our first time visiting New York City. But it just felt like some sort of surreal magic land. So they were the things that really got me motivated to think about the US as a destination for college.

Sheila Akbar:

And of course, we'll get to what you do now in a minute, but like, let's, let's take it to the next step. Now you went to Harvard, and then you've pursued many, many degrees since then. And it's funny for me to say that, because usually people say that about me because I have an undergrad, a master's and two PhDs. And people are like, Why? Why'd you overdo it? But then I look at you, and I'm like, Okay, I'm in good company. Tell us what you did after college.

Jamie Beaton:

So actually, in college, I really loved the liberal arts experience. As a US undergrad, I took all kinds of wacky classes in areas like gothic fiction, renewable energy, entrepreneurship in China, alongside the classics like math, econ, statistics and finance. But as I left my undergraduate degree, I really thought that it was important that I pursued some more study and developed some more focused skills in certain areas. So I headed off to business school, which I think was probably the most vocationally focused degree that I went for, where I really thought as a young founder of my company, crimson, I wanted to learn about marketing and sales and strategy and leadership, and I felt like I had garnered some insights from working as an investor, but a business school experience would really round that out. So I pursued that Stanford MBA, and then I also did an education master's degree. And you know, for me, I'd been working in the education space for some time, but I think, you know, and you've seen this too, when you interact with educators, there's a high bar, I think, for an educator to really look at you and feel like, hey, you know, you know what you're talking about. You've got some insights to offer. And I think as a young college kid, it was important to me that I actually received some formal training in education. So that was probably the next set of academic pursuits. And then I guess I touched on a couple of other ones, but probably another interesting one was my PhD in public policy, which I did at Oxford. And when I was there, I actually researched what drives student outcomes and student satisfaction in online schools. And it was funny, because when I began this PhD, they told me this topic was almost too niche. But then COVID emerged, and online schooling became this kind of global obsession, you know, was it good? Was it was it bad? No longer a niche. Yeah, no longer a niche. And so, you know, that certainly made the topic very interesting for my thesis advisor and I, and that. Became a big focus for several years, and then I've continued pursuing a range of different graduate studies over the last several years. For me, you know, I've really found academic studies a source of great joy and fun amazing folks at these different universities, and certainly helps with what I do at Crimson as well.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, that's a great segue. So give us a kind of overview of what crimson does, and what you feel your mission is there.

Jamie Beaton:

So I started crimson, because as a kiwi in New Zealand, I thought it was incredibly complicated to figure out how you go from New Zealand high schools to these top universities. And I had many talented peers that they rocked the chemistry Olympiad or the Math Olympiad, or they had great academics, but they applied to many of their schools and weren't so successful. And so I thought I could leverage some of my experiences going to these top schools, helping kiwis, initially in New Zealand, going abroad, we had some fast success there, and by about 2016 three quarters of New Zealand's Ivy League students were trained by us. And then we began expanding to more international countries, from Australia to the UK, to Thailand, and have since built out a great practice in the US as well. And in general, you know, we focus on the tippy top US universities, the really competitive schools, typically the US top 30, with more than 1000 kids now that have received offers to the Ivy League schools. So we're generally known for a pretty high intensity style of College Counseling, where we begin nice and early, and we help the student find their intrinsic sparks, and then really work with them to build their profile pretty intensively over several years, mapping out how they manage their time and different projects. And, you know, academic pursuits really with the goal of getting into one of those top schools that I think is a real enabler for their future. And then as far as our mission, it's really to eliminate the barriers of geography to an amazing education and subsequent career pathway. And I see this in my young Kiwis for our early years at Crimson, students like Zong, who grew up in a public school in New Zealand, came through crimson, has gone off to Cal Tech, then to NASA, to Tesla, to Waymo to MIT, or folks like seyun, who grew up in Sydney and then headed off to Princeton, and it works at a quant hedge fund called Jane Street, and is soon actually enrolling MIT for computer science. It's very hard to get into many of these incredible career pathways if you don't go through a US undergraduate education. And so I see crimson really being this global enabler for these ambitious kids to get there. And of course, any kind of private education company has its flaws and that not everyone can use the service all the time, but we do have a huge scholarship program for lower income students and a lot of financial aid and other ways and content that students can leverage, even if they're not one of our paying clients to get into these schools. So that's a bit about crimson and sort of the mission.

Sheila Akbar:

And Crimson is not just college consulting. You also have an online school, right? Tell us about that.

Jamie Beaton:

Yeah. So we've got a fully accredited online high school called the Crimson global Academy. I launched this as I was finishing my PhD at Oxford, and my insight was that there were schools in North America that cater to some students, like the Stanford online high school, but around the world, there was a real gap for a world class private school that offered a levels and AP that was also flexible, and kids could do part time alongside their physical high school or full time as a full school replacement. And so we've launched that we have about 2000 students, and the school is now actually the third highest ranked on their high school in the States, and top 10 for STEM and we've been really focused on academic excellence, and then, of course, aiming for those top schools. So it's been really good fun. And I love CGA, or crimson global Academy, because within college counseling, we often spend several hours a week with a student. But through CGA, we're spending 2030, hours a week with our students, and we can make an even more, you know, magnificent impact on their trajectory. So CGA was a sort of natural evolution of our core college mission support.

Sheila Akbar:

Okay, so I'm thinking about, I have so many questions for you, but there seems to be a real emphasis on, let's say, the higher end of the spectrum of achievement, at Crimson, which certainly, you know, there are kids who want that, who need that, who will thrive in those sorts of environments. But obviously in the United States in particular, but all over the world, there are all kinds of institutions of higher learning that are not so achievement focused, right? And I guess, to put a finer point on it, there are the majority of colleges in the United States except the majority of applicants, right? When we talk about, you mentioned the top 30 or even the top 100, that's when we start talking about schools that accept less than 50% of their students, and in many cases, only single digit numbers of applicants. So what are your thoughts on on that? I mean, that seems like you've carved out a niche for yourself at this other end of the spectrum. But what about people who who are more interested or maybe perhaps more suited to one of those environments?

Jamie Beaton:

So I think that in the broad landscape of College Counseling, there's a. Fine line between sort of an insidious undermining of a student's real potential and supporting them to a best fit school. I think about one of my old partners at Crimson, David fried, who was at a public school in Texas, and the college counselor said, Hey, there's no point. You're applying to the Ivy League schools. You know, you have no shot, even though he then went off to Harvard. So I think that what I find really upsetting is when you have a system that sort of assesses a kid when they're 12 or 13 or 14 and begins telling them, Hey, you don't have what it takes. You're not actually able to do academics that well. You need to settle for certain schools and settle early. Now, if a student actually, genuinely wants to go to a given school that is particularly unselective and the school suits them, for some reason, all good, but I think what typically happens is you have progressive waves of students who sort of give up trying throughout high school, and only a very thin sliver of students are continuously told, Hey, you can do it. You can do it. We believe in you. And a lot of students are told, hey, you know, take it easy. Just two other paths. So I guess I don't really think it's like you've got this thin sliver of kids that can ever possibly compete against top schools. I think the base of students that could give it a crack is much higher than people probably think, and there's some conflation there. But let me say to the point of all these schools, you know, we send lots of students to a wide range of US schools we have, you know, other units of crimson, like college wise, that focuses on a broad range of US colleges. And many of these schools are great. There are some US universities that are unselected, that I think aren't good institutions. They act like they're as good as these top schools. They charge the same prices, and they don't deliver the graduate outcomes. And then on, the more dangerous end you have the you know, for profit, universities that you know, exploit things like student loan mechanisms and uninformed students to settle them with huge amounts of debt with terrible student outcomes. And the overarching context I've given you is, as a student in New Zealand, you can pursue an entire degree for the cost of half one semester at most US colleges. So my starting point is that most US higher education is, like, extremely overpriced and, like, crazily expensive, and that only a certain portion of the country's universities actually give the students the promise they preach, which is, you know, a brighter future and a pathway through to, you know, real prosperity for their families.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, you know, that brings me to the thing that I invited you here to talk about, and I'll set the stage for that a little bit, but just to recap kind of what you're sharing there, I think you know, while you and I may differ on the specifics, but you know, you're calling out under matching right students being encouraged to Aim lower than they might be able to achieve if given the right supports and encouragement. You're calling out the ROI of higher education, right? What? What are the outcomes that colleges can actually deliver, and who's over promising, and then the third then is obviously the cost of this whole thing. But you know, your answer brought me to thinking about the larger issue that I want to discuss with you is you have this international perspective. You've you grew up in another country, you've gone to institutions in the US and abroad, and obviously now you work with families who are looking at all kinds of different institutions. So I think, and you've studied this at the academic level, as I'm really interested to hear your sort of comparative perspective on this, because I think in the United States, the college admissions system really hits a nerve, a very foundational nerve, in our society, and I think that's evidence in a lot of the reaction to the article that was about you and crimson and what you've achieved in the Wall Street Journal recently, right? I know that was very exciting for you, right, to have your success highlighted in that way. But I also know there was a lot of sort of backlash, people talking about how this is, you know, a side door for the wealthy, and how broken the college admission system is. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on that. I guess I asked you a couple of different questions as I'm rambling here. But your your thoughts on the sort of comparative perspective, and then why this hits such a nerve here in the US.

Jamie Beaton:

Absolutely. So I think, firstly on the comparative perspective. So I think the US emissions process is actually the best of the many flawed options that exist. And if you think about the world, I think about China, India, the UK, New Zealand or the US. Just briefly, let me give you some comparisons. So starting with New Zealand, in New Zealand, the bar to get into university is pretty low. You pass university entrance often two years out of finishing high school, and the bar is not high to hit that university entrance. What this does is it removes all incentive for kids to try hard in the final years of high school, and so you have the system where, basically the majority of students, in fact, the vast, vast majority, have no incentive to really try hard in school. Now you can say that everyone should have magic, intrinsic motivation, and maybe some do, but a lot of the time, if you tell a student, hey, you just need to pass, you'll be fine. The student will aim to pass, and that's what happens across an entire country. And then what you. Is basically students heading into university that could have tried a lot harder in high school, they could have had stronger foundations, but instead, you've got sort of a weak national curriculum followed by low entry standards, and then this dangerous loop. Moving to Australia, you have a slightly more rigorous system where there is actually a national ranking percentile, and certain competitive programs, like medicine law have much higher interest standards than certain degrees like commerce or arts, and there's a real marketplace of options, from highly selective programs like Monash medicine to uncompetitive schools across the country like say, Bond University, that take basically everybody. And I think that's slightly more well functioning, but the problem that exists there is basically a lot of these degrees. There's no flexibility to take different classes. You're committing to law as an 18 year old or medicine as an 18 year old, or commerce as an 10 year old. And so your ability to sort of discover the career path that really suits you and the academic field that really suits you is more limited. But still, there's some good options in Australia, and it's getting better. The UK, I think, has many amazing institutions. If you think about the London School of Economics, or Oxford or Cambridge or Imperial College London, these are all great schools with big reputations, fantastic alumni. They deliver great outcomes for their graduates. So I would say, on the whole, great schools. The big critique you could make of these universities is they're not particularly good at fundraising, and as a result, they have bad financial aid for international students. So most the international students at these schools are paying full tuition, and there's no great alternative. There's some scholarships. For example, my coo akesh Patel had a Meyer Scholarship, which was a full scholarship to Cambridge University, enabling him to go from New Zealand to this amazing school. But most students can't do that. So you have basically a fairly diverse UK pool of students, but the international students at Oxford and Cambridge and stuff are generally from pretty high income families. Then briefly you've got China and India, which is almost like The Hunger Games, where you just sit the Gaucho or the respective assessments in India and you grind and just take a single score your academics, and that's what determines who gets in. Arguably, that's, you know, it's actually very, it's a very fair system, and that it's just like a huge academic competition. But it does create immense stress, and it also creates the flip side of the New Zealand problem, where kids are obsessed with a single test score and single academic process for basically five to eight years, and it kind of consumes the high school experience and crowds everything else out. And then finally, you have the lovely world off the US higher education system, where, basically the scoreboard enables you to perform across academics, extracurriculars, leadership essays, interviews. You can try different interests. You can specialize in astrophysics. You can try 10 different majors, and all of that can be shown on the application. So ultimately, I would say the US process is the best enabler of number one, it incentivizes kids to try hard and to hustle and to work hard, but but also, number two, it lets you kind of be who you want to be a lot of the time and still build a fantastic profile the schools recognize. And then three, there's a real sort of marketplace of choice, so you can really choose from a variety of institutions that suit you. And then finally, putting on my international hat, this huge financial aid for international students. So many of my kids from low income backgrounds around the world can land at places like Harvard and have all their flights, winter coats, food, accommodation, tuition, all covered, which is a bit of a game changer. So that would be, I would say, my take on sort of the comparative dynamics. And ultimately, you know, the US is winning the world's higher education marketplace, and it is the most desirable, and kids all around the world choose it as the number one destination. So I'll stop there, and then we can touch on your second second question.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, yeah, let's, let's pause there. You know that that was a really nice kind of tour around the world, and I'm not going to debate you on the description of any of those systems. But one thing that I am really curious about, and listeners probably already know my thoughts on this, but I want to hear yours, is that Hunger Games dynamic that you mentioned is so prevalent in China and certainly in India, has somehow made its way into America for the populations that are interested in the most selective universities, it's absolutely a hunger game situation. And my thesis on this is a little bit of, well, it is a scarce resource at those schools, there's a very limited number of seats the you know, the competition is so high, of course, it's going to be somewhat Hunger Games II. And the other piece of this is, you know, especially with the clientele that I am typically working with, tend to be immigrant families, and they are used to that system, and they bring their expectations of that system to here, and then that it plays out in their parenting and the choices that they make for their for their students. But I'm curious what you see as why it sometimes feels like The Hunger Games in this US system, which seems to encompass some of the things from all of these different places that you've just described.

Jamie Beaton:

Yeah, so great question. So I think as far as answering this, and I'll be as blunt as I can, if you're in a country like New Zealand, and everyone's just pretty relaxed and high. School, then the result of that is no one has to really try that hard, because people's content preparation for exams isn't that high and people aren't doing that many activities. In New Zealand, it's very interesting. You've had a lot of migration from both China and India, and at the biggest school in the country by academics, it's a school called Auckland Grammar School. They have a streaming system where basically, kids are ranked from top to bottom in a variety of classes, and every term based on their academic grades. You move from class to class. So you can imagine, you know, it's a bit of a pressure cooker. And interestingly, in the top class, nearly the entire class comes from China, with some Indian students. And then basically you've got more diversity throughout the rest of the school, but you essentially have this top class, which is in New Zealand, a country that has a 15% Asian population, but they dominate that entire top class. And what you've seen over the last 10 years is that basically, with more and more migration from both China and India and also Korea and Japan and stuff, you have academic cultures being imported basically from these high competition call it Hunger Games markets. And what that does is it means that you can no longer just chill and be okay. You have to actually start working harder and harder and harder in high school. And you know, what you see in New Zealand is that 75% of the kids of the country's top 10 scholars in a given year on average, come from the Chinese or Indian community. And you have this massive academic outperformance and over time, that just means that more and more society has to engage with academics really formidably. Otherwise, they're left behind these really ambitious immigrants that bring their cultural focus to New Zealand. So now thinking about the US example, if you were to simplify this and just dial it down to you've got different cultures with different academic expectations. Generally, recent immigrants have a hardcore willingness to compete in these types of academic adventures. And they're coming from cultures where they're used to hard work in terms of grinding from a young age in their education systems, they migrate to America, they have put in hard yards to get there, and you bet they want the next generation to do better. And so you have an increasing proportion of students at schools like Harker in California or some of the magnet schools across Washington or Texas that come from these immigrant groups. I think about some of the events we run in New Jersey, for example, that are dominated by folks from immigrant communities. And I think this can largely explain why there's been an increase in, quote, unquote, a high intensity academic focus in America, because you have more and more of this cultural influence from China, from India, from India, from other parts of the world, entering the country. I think that's that's one part of it. The second thing, just from a beyond kind of cultural group phenomena, is you have the prize has never been higher. So if you get into a place like Stanford or Harvard, you basically can automatically raise a multi million dollar seed fundraise for your startup if you want to do that. And many of our crimson alumni, more than 15 have raised multi million dollar seed rounds having finished their degrees. If you want to work on Wall Street, the fastest way to get there is to go through these Ivy League schools. If you want to, for example, get to a top law school. The best way to get there is, you know, again, through a strong undergraduate school. So you have on the supply side, a lot of the big jobs that, you know, base their hiring off this kind of education ranking system. So I think there are a couple of dynamics that I think contribute to this. And the final thing is, as more information gets out about the college admissions process and what the top kids are doing, that lifts the bar for everybody else, it means that while there are more applicants applying to Harvard today than 30 years ago, actually the average quality of those applicants is way higher as well. So there are a couple of the reasons why things have gotten more intense, but honestly, they're not that intense in America. People feel that way in some pockets of the country, but if you compare them to Korea or China, or even some of the Chinese communities in Australia, it's still largely not that intense. And so I would say we're extremely far from an environment where it's like unhinged, and of course, it always feels more intense this year than last year in America, because every other competition gets higher, but it's still two to three times easier to get in from America than for many of these international countries. And in general, you know, it's softer competition. So I would say, yes, it's getting hotter and more intense, but it's far away from being crazy in my opinion?

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, well, I just hope we never see that. I hope it just doesn't get there. But let's get to my second question is like, Why? Why do you think there is such a reaction to something like your spotlight in the Wall Street Journal the other day?

Jamie Beaton:

I guess there are a couple of things, you know. The first is that we've been really effective at sending, you know, more than 1000 students now to these Ivy League schools. Last year we had 294, to the Ivy League. So I guess when folks sort of see firms that have seen a couple here and there to these top schools, that's one thing, but doing it at pretty substantial scale, which is becoming a, you know, meaningful percentage of the incoming class of these schools. Obviously, people want to wonder, you know, what is the process? What is the culture of training? How does one approach this, to actually get in? And I think what people find pretty intense is like the resumes of the kids who actually get in, and perhaps just the level of focus we take to training students for these top schools. You. There are some stats in that, in the article about how our average league kid took 10 APs. Or, you know, a lot of our kids do projects and podcasts and other initiatives to build their leadership skills. I think the other thing that really gets people going is they think, Man, this like destroys someone's childhood. It's like so bad for their ability to be a child and relax. And I actually think this is a crazy argument. I think actually, if you think about our crimson students, and you actually meet them, and a couple weekends ago, I was at Stanford, and I had an event with 30 current Stanford kids that are crimson students, and we had an off site retreat for them to give them some strategies around how they can best succeed in college. When you actually meet these students, they're some of the most curious, electrified, excited, passionate kids on the planet. And if you compare these kids who are so intrinsically passionate about learning and also being ambitious and successful to a typical kid in America, they're actually far more enthralled by the education process. And so it's an interesting thing where as an outsider, you look at this and you think, man, these kids must be having a horrible time, but then you meet them and they're actually loving the journey. And so I think there's that desire for many parents who probably haven't engaged in this kind of intensive training, to say, actually, that kind of style of parenting is terrible. You know, I would never do that. These people are crazy doing this, but often those parents are then sending us an inquiry, and also they, at the same time, aren't quite grasping that the college process in America fundamentally incentivizes good behavior. It incentivizes you to be a better leader, pursue more academics, manage your time better, articulate yourself better in essays, and all these traits help you to be a high performer in the future, and it then produces amazing results for our graduates, as far as all the all the companies that go to work for. So I think that's another part of the nerve center around, sort of this tension around parenting styles and sort of who these kids are that are getting in. And then finally, probably the pricing and tuition cost of some of our services. The Wall Street Journal certainly wanted to highlight some of the more comprehensive programs we offer. But a lot of families across America, across a variety of states, jumping into crimson for pretty standard prices in our industry. And a lot of families choose to leave private schools, and they use crimson plus public school when they get better results. And you know, private schools in America can cost 40k per year for five years of high school. That's a very big cost. And if you can instead pay for a more targeted service and then go to your public school, you might get a far better return on investment for your education dollars. So there are a couple of kind of reactions and thoughts that I think I would say, from the article, but happy to hear your thoughts as well, from from your community.

Sheila Akbar:

Sure. And you know, I want to preface this by, yeah, I consider you a friend. I have a lot of respect for you, but I think we have very different philosophies about this. And of course, I've met, I mean, I don't think I've met any of the students from crimson, but I've met students like the ones you're describing, who, who. I mean, I think you are one of them, right? Who just want to devour every academic opportunity that is in front of them. Learning is so meaningful and so enthralling to them. I was this way in high school, right? I know that these students exist, and I know that their parents aren't forcing them to be this way, right, but I think the place where I find things get a little bit blurry, perhaps dangerous is when that narrative becomes the media narrative about college admissions, because it has such a downstream effect of even students who may be that you know, excited about learning and that motivated and all of these things without parental pressure. It puts pressure on those students to do more. Their parents hear it, and their parents are already anxious, uncertain about their their child's future, probably not because of anything that has to do with their child, but more about the times we live in. Right the way society has stratified itself, the certain you already mentioned this, some of the jobs that are accessible through certain pathways of education, and some that are not, and essentially social mobility and stability in today's world, we're recording this the day before the election, so that anxiety is quite high. But parents hear that and don't, don't really clock that. You know, the students for whom that model works are the students who are already on that path in some sort of mental way. And then they start saying, Okay, we need to do this. We're competing with those students. And then it becomes a Hunger Games at that level. And then it also has, I think, an effect on students who may not maybe they're not even considering college, maybe they're the first person in their family to ever even consider College, and this just reinforces the message that college is not for them. They aren't seeing this as Oh, Harvard or Stanford or this. You know, small slice of colleges wants this or that, or tends to accept these kinds of students. They see it as Oh, all College wants that, and I'm not that, so I've got no chance at college. So why should I even try? Right? It has a demotivating effect. Opposite of the one that you were you were referencing as motivating. So I'm not saying all of that is your responsibility, certainly not you're, you know, you run a business, but it's the society we live in, and I think that's the that's the thing that I'm really interested in investigating further. Like this system is one that I think as Americans, we pin A lot of our idealism on right. It is a part and parcel of the founding mechanism of how a democracy should work. Right, a great public education system that allows for social mobility, that allows for people to study as much as they want, go as far as they want, do whatever it is that they want, and an educated populace is essential to making our democracy work. And at the same time, we think that the process should be fair the way we believe democracy should be fair. And I'm using air quotes. I know we don't move on, but obviously we know that this process is not fair, right? There are certain people who can access advice from you or me. There are people who can access, you know, athletics or their families can make big donations, or they have legacy status, or, you know, any number of things you can point to that show you very clearly that this is not a pure meritocracy. Nothing actually is. But we like to believe that this should be more meritocratic than other systems in our society, because this one is so foundational to our society working. I'm curious for your thoughts about that.

Jamie Beaton:

First of all, beautifully articulated. Let me try and respond to some of those. The first thing that I would say, and I opened this was America system is the best sports system we have. And I come at this from the lovely soft land of New Zealand, where it's a beautiful country, but the education system is broken because there is no incentive for anyone to really try at a hardcore level, if you're looking at domestic universities, and if you look at the AB test of the American system, first, the New Zealand system. Today, I can tell you comprehensively that if you could just click your fingers and shift the New Zealand higher education system to be similar to the US. One people would do that in a heartbeat. So one thing that's worth noting is, while we should always be trying to improve us higher ed it is not by any means the worst or even the second best, I would say it's the best, but again, acknowledging that it is, of course, got its own flaws. To your point of meritocracy, I agree it's hard to actually engineer any kind of perfect meritocracy, really, anywhere, a lot of competitions, I think about even gaming, for example, take the case of a computer game like Call of Duty. In a game like this, you know, maybe it's a pure meritocracy if you all have the same disc, but if someone's on the right Discord server and has access to certain techniques or interesting combinations of attachments for their character, they'll do better. And it doesn't have anything to do with the ability of these two kids to play the game. But it's really about sort of information discovery. So anyway, a silly example, but the point is that I would say it's very hard to create any kind of pure meritocracy. But what we can do in the US system is try to make it as merit track as possible through things like, for example, you know, more broad based need, blind financial aid, more transparency into the emission system. The thing that I would probably draw a line on is, I think what I don't like is a system that is not a fair competition. But what I don't mind is intense competition. And I think actually it's really good for there to be intense competition. And if you think about us versus China, geopolitical dynamics as a country, if we have bad universities and America no longer attracts top talent from around the world, we're at a huge disadvantage in terms of the next 50 years versus a very ambitious country like China. If the US can attract hardcore academic students from all around the world, can take the top kids from India, the top kids from New Zealand, top kids from Vietnam, and bring them into America, sort them with American values, and have them compete as Americans, and really build out the US economy. That's much better for Western democracy than a world in which, you know, America sort of wants to have a participation trophy system where anyone can sort of do okay without trying that hard competition is frowned upon. And you know, meanwhile, in China, it is the Hunger Games to get into Tsinghua and Peking and beta. And you do have people that are four years ahead of Americans in terms of STEM education, you know, by the time they're 18, that's, I think, a far, far worse alternative. So I would say I would look for anything that can make the system more meritocratic, but I wouldn't want to do things that undermines the competitive intensity of the system, because ultimately, this is not like people are doing, like a hot dog getting competition, and it's bad for all of them to compete. You know, if you, if you do more math, and you, you know, you learn math earlier, or you begin coding earlier, or you try a Leadership Project earlier, where you read more books for Columbia's, what did you read in the last two years? Supplement, all these things are net good for you, and the alternatives, like Doom scrolling on tick tock, or getting involved with drugs in high school, or, you know, not trying as a high school student. Student, or actually, in a case like New Zealand being truant and not actually going to high school and tapping out of the system, those things are all much worse. So I think if kids are competing on the landscape of academics and extracurriculars and leadership, that is great for the country. And of course, you need to mitigate their stress, and you need to make sure that there's other ways for them to feel success. And for kids who can't or don't want to compete in sort of this higher education training. You know, there are other pathways, great, but I think it's, it's really shooting a missile into the heart of what's made America so successful. To begin, you know, ripping apart the system that has created 15 of the world's top 20 global universities that every year, imports the world's smartest young minds to America. It would be disastrous to unwind that, in my opinion, and the talent would just go to other countries. And ultimately, would worsen the democracy that you're worried about.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, I mean, I don't, I don't think anyone's proposing, like, burn it all down, but I do think we need some guardrails. And I think, to your point, you said this, but didn't focus much on it, but I think it's like, so true is the transparency, I think, the communication between the gatekeepers of higher ed and the students who are going to apply to it, or their families that communications. There is no system of communications. It's so fragmented, it's so piecemeal. There's so much incomplete information, misinformation, purposeful disinformation. It's just a real mess, and I think that may be a place that we can start. Okay, well, I think you and I could probably go on about this for a very long time, but we'll spare our listeners that debate. I thank you, Jamie, for your time. This is a really great conversation.

Jamie Beaton:

Super fun and always happy to discuss more. Yeah, I think, I think it is a, it's a really challenging one, because it strikes the heart of, you know, should you have an all public education system? Should there be entrepreneurship and sort of for profit mechanisms at play in a kind of clean meritocracy? What's the role of coaching? You know, should there even be private schools or private tutors, or any of this stuff? And, you know, it's sort of a messy one in the middle, you know, how much is too much? What kind of support should be enabled? What are the role of external advisors in this kind of process? It is a thorny one. And I would say it's, it's not a perfect world to have no training at all. And China tried that. They banned all for profit tutoring temporarily. And it created sort of a national disaster with black markets and parents, it actually created more inequality, because the high income families could still find their black market tutors and everyone else couldn't. So I mean, I definitely probably stick to the line that it's the best, flawed system that exists. We need to keep working on it. But it's definitely far from broken, and it's working okay with you know, recent things like banning affirmative action being quite exciting, probably in some ways, but also horrifying in others. So it's tough, but I think we've got to keep tinkering with it, and hopefully you and I can play a good role in making it better.

Sheila Akbar:

Yeah, all right, that's a great place to leave it. Thank you again. Jamie.

Jamie Beaton:

Thank you. Bye. Bye.

Sheila Akbar:

Well, I definitely could have gone on with him for many more hours, and, you know, maybe at some point we'll have him back to do some more of that discussion. But I hope you found that enlightening as to how some people see the college process and how I see it. And of course, both points of view are valid, but I think we need to think about, you know, I personally believe we need to think about who are we serving, and what is the purpose of education in our country, and how can we design a system that serves that goal? But I'll leave that there. We had a lot of interest in last week's live coaching episode. My student, Roger, we called him, was very excited to share the episode, and I hope that you enjoyed it as well. And as I've said before, we are pivoting in the new year to a live coaching model. So if you have a question that you want to get answered, whether you're a student or a parent or someone who works with students, please submit it via the links in our show notes, and we'll have you on to discuss. And it's okay if you don't think the question is worth 3040, minutes of discussion on it could be a very short one, and I'm happy to take it offline as well, but please do reach out, because it's an exciting new format, and I want people to be able to take advantage of it. We're going to take a short break here to take Thanksgiving off, and we'll be back in December with, you know, some new content for you, and I want to take a moment to just thank you for being a listener, for caring about this stuff and for doing all the things that you do. So thanks, folks, and we'll see you not next week, but the week after. Take care.