00:32:01 · David Booth, Jamie Beaton
[00:32:01] S0: You'll see... I mean, you're only ten years in, but as as this journey unfolds and many of the early success stories start to unfold, I'm sure you'll see something similar, if not really. [00:32:09] S1: Yeah. Yeah. We we definitely have grateful Crimson parents that sponsor some students to go through the program, And we've certainly seen some early alums achieving amazing things. I think about one of our students, Brendan. He went from Australia to Harvard. He was a black student temporarily. He launched a company called Fig, and he sold it to Amazon in his mid twenties. Pretty impressive stuff. And so, you know, he's not even 30, and he's already had his first big win on the entrepreneurial school board. And, you know, someone like that is an incredible mentor for the next generation.
00:32:09 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:32:09] S1: Yeah. Yeah. We we definitely have grateful Crimson parents that sponsor some students to go through the program, And we've certainly seen some early alums achieving amazing things. I think about one of our students, Brendan. He went from Australia to Harvard. He was a black student temporarily. He launched a company called Fig, and he sold it to Amazon in his mid twenties. Pretty impressive stuff. And so, you know, he's not even 30, and he's already had his first big win on the entrepreneurial school board. And, you know, someone like that is an incredible mentor for the next generation. [00:32:38] S0: You said something that is really interesting. It's not just the students that wanna get into the top institutions. It's the top institutions that actually wanna build out a base of students, a pipeline of of students who are, you know, beyond perhaps the standard form... Model of of applicant, let's say. Have you... I mean, do you work actively with those universities? And if so, is there an alignment of incentives problem where, you know, you are representing a student and what's best for the student themselves and which institution is best for them? I imagine if you were... It's almost a little bit like recruiting, and the recruiter will work on behalf of a company, and they'll try and find the best candidate for the company even if it's not in the candidate's best interests. How do you sort of think about the serving two customers there and resolving that conflict of interest?
00:33:21 · Jamie Beaton
[00:33:21] S1: So we focus purely on the student and the parent and what's best for them as a unit. Yeah. We help them get into the school that best suits them, negotiate the best package for them, and that's our full focus. The universities benefit, of course, from our work around the world promoting the schools, the opportunities, the scholarships, helping to level up the human capital of these students so that they actually land on campus, they're more equipped to succeed, helping them get more applicants. So Crimson plays a really valuable role in the university's recruiting process. A lot of universities don't have the desire to send their admissions officers to far flung parts of the world to try and, you know, find students applying or explain the complicated process. A lot of the time, they can't even go into much detail about their process because they don't wanna be stoking the flames of competition. You know, they don't wanna go to Vietnam and tell everyone, hey. You need 15 AP exams to actually get in from this country or something. And so Crimson places important, you know, arm's length role in the process. But, yeah, we focus on students and parents, and that's a really important driver of our success. The students know that we're purely focused on them and and getting results for them.
00:34:24 · David Booth, Jamie Beaton
[00:34:24] S0: Yep. Yep. So there's no there's no working on behalf of a particular college trying to fill out their specific application pathway. Even though I think the... Probably the middle of the bell curve of colleges in The US would actually really like that service, that they're looking for more applications, particularly where where, you know, we started out a more global application pool for Totally. A more selective sort of top tier. I mean, you're really curious about the... Yeah. What that says what that says for the college model generally, and I have absolutely no fear for the Stanfords and Harvard as well. You know, people are gonna be applying to go to those institutions based on the raw prestige and the sort of the density of talent that comes along with it. The middle of... Or the middle to lower end of the spectrum of colleges in The US seems like there is an industry which is not necessarily serving its customer terribly well. Yep. Yeah. There's a a still a very expensive product. A lot of the the data in in this country in particular, we're sitting here in New York, shows that people who took on a lot of student debt over the past decade [00:35:21] S1: Yep.
00:35:21 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:35:21] S1: Yep. [00:35:22] S0: Have not necessarily ended up better off than doing so. A lot of the colleges that, you know, charge them a lot of money and stacked up a lot of student student loans along the way have sort of become fat and bloated of sort of the administrative overhead. The the the cost disease, Baumol's cost disease has continued to drive prices up in the space. If you connect this together with a conversation about AI and the the dropping cost of tutoring and the understanding of what's actually needed in the world to succeed, what happens in the next, knows, ten years? Is there a reckoning coming for the the long tail of higher education? What happens next?
00:35:57 · Jamie Beaton, David Booth
[00:35:57] S1: So firstly, I would say a huge amount of the world's universities today shouldn't really exist anymore. And the reason for that is they've got no competitive advantage. They sit in a country, and they've only succeeded because they physically are close to a bunch of students. But in a world of online access and global mobility, if they have no competitive advantage and they don't have a particularly good commerce program or a particularly good AI program, they're just a physical building with teachers who aren't necessarily best in class without any particular magic or alumni community. Those universities will get smoked over time. Why would you... You know, if you're a student in Wellington, and you could take part in a Johns Hopkins online, you know, medical undergrad degree with some in person, some online, and they had a remote lab, for example, in Wellington, but you took a lot of the core classes from some of world's best faculty in Baltimore, Maryland. [00:36:43] S0: Mhmm.