Talk about going to the head of the class!

I know an awful lot of people with advanced degrees. Mostly master's degrees of some sort: MBA, MA, MS, MAT, MLS, MFA, MSN. A few law degrees, a few medical degrees, a few PhDs. Most of the advanced degree folks I know have "just" two degrees: undergraduate and whatever. Some of them have three degrees. My husband had an MA in Chemistry and a PhD in Economics. My brother Tom has a PhD in Construction Management or Civil Engineering. I forget which, and I can't find him on Linkedin. I believe he also has a master's floating around somewhere. 

Every once in a while, I tell myself to go get an MFA, which would make me a three-degree-er. But after I tell mysef to go get an MFA,  I always ask myself the big question: WHY? And the answer is: no good reason; so why bother.

But Jamie Beaton really likes being in school. I'd call him a lifelong learner - and there's no reason to believe he won't be - but he's only 31. And so far, Beaton has amassed 13 degrees, starting with an undergraduate (magna) from Harvard, and a master's in applied math while he was at it. At least I think it's 13. Not having a master's in applied math (as if!), I may have lost count.

Enough is never enough, and by the time he was 28, he'd piled on with a Stanford MBA, a law degree from Yale, and a PhD from Oxford. 

Harvard. Stanford. Yale. Oxford.

Beaton's definitely not going for the cheapo online degrees that give you credit for life. He's pretty much got the Ivies covered: Harvard, Yale, Penn, Princeton, Cornell, Dartmouth, Brown. What up, Jamie? No Columbia?

Oh, yeah, he's currently studying journalism at Columbia. (Correction: I just looked at Jamie's LinkedIn profile, and he was awarded a degree in journalism in May. So make that 14 degrees.)

In addition to all his Ivy creds, he's gotten degrees from King's College London and Tsinghua in Beijing. 

Beaton definitely has a broad range of interests: finance, health care policy, educational technology, global affairs, data science.

“The first five degrees had a clear skill acquisition component to them,” [Beaton] said. “Since then, it’s really been about following different passions and curiosities.” (Source: NY Times)

Oh. 

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.

But wait - you will be unsurprised to learn - there's more frosting on the degree cake. (Beaton has said that, in his family "Academics were our religion. Ah, that's where I went wrong. In my family you were expected to be a grade-grubbing nerd, but Catholicism was our actual religion.)

Before he started at Harvard, Beaton - a New Zealander who "was admitted to 25 universities, including Harvard, Yale and Princeton."

...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.

Crimson Education, where Beaton is CEO and where fees range from $30K to $200K, is valued at $600M. And while Beaton was an undergrad, he commuted two days a week to NYC to work for a hedge fund. 

“I love the action, and I love a jam-packed day,” [Beaton] said. “It’s good fun.”

Maybe that's my lack-of-degree problem. The thought of a jam-packed day exhausts me. Just reading about Beaton's accomplishments makes me want to away to my fainting couch for a nap.

When I was growing up, one of our board games was something called Go to the Head of the Class. I can't remember the entire plot, but you went around the board answering questions and at the end I guess you got to don a virtual mortarboard. Naturally, this game appealed to the grade-grubbing nerd I was, but just how difficult could those questions have been if the game was played by 8-year-olds?

Who was the first president of the United States? What's 12x12? What's the main ingredient in a tuna sandwich? Who's buried in Grant's tomb?

I suspect that, even at the age of 8, Jamie Beaton wouldn't have wasted 2 minutes of his jam-packed day playing Go to the Head of the Class. (And just as a by the way, Beaton met his wife in a Columbia journalism class.)

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