Congratulations to our CEO & co-founder Jamie Beaton on completing his ELEVENTH university degree — this time from Cornell! 🎓 Jamie’s journey is a testament to lifelong learning. Having studied at institutions including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, and now Cornell, he's developed rare first-hand perspective to help guide our Crimson students to highly selective universities. We’re proud to celebrate this milestone and the example Jamie sets for our team and the students we serve around the world.
I am excited to graduate from Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences with a Master of Science in Health Policy and Economics. At Harvard University I stumbled into a class on global health and nutrition in freshman year by accident following a classmate and discovered a fascinating field. That initial academic experience led me to pursue a secondary in Global Health and Healthcare Policy. Perhaps alongside only education, healthcare stands as one of the most critical ways to level up a society and is one of the most enduring promises of most Western governments. I decided back then in college that at some stage I wanted to dig a lot deeper into my passion for healthcare. In almost every Western country, dissatisfaction with our healthcare systems are reaching a fever pitch. Growing up in New Zealand, we always considered our healthcare system to be world class, accessible and quite a badge of national pride. In recent years, the system has experienced growing strain similar to the National Health Service. With aging demographics, record debt levels and growing life expectancy, a thorny problem exists to navigate. I loved learning about the sprawling array of differing healthcare delivery models around the world, innovations in telemedicine, new funding models, the trade-offs of allowing private investors and private healthcare providers into markets, the drivers of massive US drug prices compared to the rest of the world as well as differences in healthcare delivery in countries like China. A huge thanks to all the incredible faculty at Cornell for a brilliant academic experience and my classmates from all over the world. I can't wait to see the impact you make in your countries! Riley Spadaro Crimson Education