The Profile
Running with purpose
Mixing public policy, science and data analytics, QS’ Chief Executive, Jessica Turner has a unique perspective on higher education. She sits down with Anton John Crace to discuss her philosophy on the sector, the power of data, and why impact and purpose drive her work.
There is one word to describe Jessica Turner’s approach to education and business: impact.
QS Quacquarelli Symonds new CEO takes a purpose-driven and meaning-focussed philosophy into her position, embodied by the company’s mission to empower motivated students across the globe to fulfil their potential.
Appointed as Chief Executive in September 2022, Turner joined QS in 2019, later working as Group Managing Director from January 2020 onwards. Her approach, to provide clarity in data and information for societal benefit, has helped guide the company's transformation and refocussed its attention on the primary stakeholders of higher education, students and universities.
“I've always been very interested in information and how the information that people have shapes their experience of life in a positive way and a negative way,” she tells QS Insights Magazine. “We see ourselves as a partner to the sector who are providing an independent and trusted perspective both for institutions and for students to help both create connections and make decisions.”
With two decades experience in data analytics in business, and a further decade in higher education, Turner’s journey to leading QS is equal parts conventional and unconventional, but always driven by purpose.
Coming home
Like many in international education, she first experienced and fell in love with the sector experiencing it first-hand, but didn’t return to work within it until later. After graduating from the University of Sydney with a degree in mathematics and working as a consultant in Australia and the Asia Pacific, she studied a Master in Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School in the US.
“That really gave me a new perspective. I was really intrigued by understanding other cultures and other societies in a much deeper way than I had realised before,” she says. “Growing up in Australia, I felt that I understood American culture and international cultures quite well, but actually, the reality of what the global world really looked like was something I only realised when I lived overseas.”
This new perspective in turn drove a desire to understand how policymaking, governments and businesses affect the course of people’s lives. Combined with her science-led undergraduate degree, she spent the next two decades consulting and working in media and technology companies and data and analytics businesses, including periods in both New York and London, where she is now based. “Data analytics and information are really fundamental to the experiences, opportunities and perspectives people have and are forces that shape our lives,” she adds.
“I've been lucky to work for impact-driven, very thoughtful, mission-driven organisations.”
After a period of time working in the financial business of media conglomerate Thomson Reuters, she moved into the company’s scientific and academic research arm, re-entering the higher education space. Eventually she served as General Manager of the Scientific and Academic Business at both Thomson Reuters and Clarivate Analytics. The organisation served over 7,000 universities globally, supporting researchers and measuring research impact. The sector shift, Turner says, was a return “back to my roots”.
Throughout her childhood in Australia's capital, Canberra, Turner grew up around science, research, business and education. An agricultural scientist, her father worked on crop breeding to feed growing populations in arid climates. Her mother, meanwhile, owned a business supplying educational toys for early childhood. In her youth, she spent hours in the store, later working there as a teenager.
“I do think that was something that was quite strong in my family: that drive to figure out how do we help in broader areas that are of importance to society,” she says. “It's probably not surprising that I ended up at the nexus of business and academia.”
The importance of impact
A book of remembrance sits in the foyer of Thomson Reuters’ London office. Inside, each page serves as a dedication to a person injured or killed during their service for the organisation. Walking past the book each morning, Turner says she was struck not only by its sombre contents, but also by its power in celebrating the meaningful.
“That understanding that the impact you can have in the work that you do – with integrity, independence and freedom from bias - can be something that people are willing to give up everything for really shapes the ethos of that organisation,” she reflects. “I've been lucky to work for impact-driven, very thoughtful, mission-driven organisations."
She’s applied the same focus on purpose and meaning to transforming QS and ensuring it creates its own impactful moments. "QS has brought opportunity into the lives of so many individuals around the world. I am constantly reminded of that when I speak to people in the sector," she says. "So many times people have said to me, 'QS is the reason I studied where I did. You introduced me to the university I ended up applying to, and without that connection I would be on a different path.'"
For institutions, her focus is on translating their impact to students and the community. Universities have an enormous responsibility to society, but that responsibility hasn’t always played a central institutional role, Turner observes. Historically, institutions have focussed on research in the academic world, but since rejoining the sector, she has seen a shift towards illustrating the broader societal benefits of higher education.
“Innovation and links to the impact of research have become more important,” she says. “It's also been something that many institutions have tried to measure and really actively tried to encourage. The same thing within sustainability and with social impact, with widening participation.
“That evolution over time, seeing how academia has moved from research being measured by the impact on the literature, and seeing how innovative universities have become; that’s where partners to the sector can play. Helping to create those connections, helping to ensure that we can help universities measure their impact and benchmark against peers.”
“Teaching excellence has been moving up the agenda. Innovation and links to the impact of research have become more important."
Getting that measurement right and building those connections further informs Turner’s drive to help in areas of broad societal importance. “The scientific and academic output of universities is fundamental to development in health and so many other fields,” she says. “With the trillions that are put into research and development, [how do we ensure] that we are spending that the most wisely? Not just for academic purposes, but for a far broader set of outcomes, including innovation, new drugs, new technologies, new jobs?
“That is the role that the sector can play in those broader outcomes. For me, this is why QS is a very exciting place to work and being able to help institutions to measure that, to benchmark themselves and communicate that impact to the students, partners, faculty and alumni that form their community. That's really the reason that I'm working in this space.”
Making sense of data
“QS is primarily a performance insight partner for universities and for students, and that means we can understand the strengths and opportunities of universities from a range of dimensions,” says Turner. “As the world of higher education has become increasingly global, the responsibility that universities have is, now, not just to their local communities or to their country. There's a responsibility and need to be able to educate students from around the world.”
Concurrent to Turner stepping into the CEO role at QS, the company renewed focus on helping students make informed choices and solving universities’ student recruitment challenges. Under her leadership, QS is building out its capabilities to support students and partner with universities to achieve their international recruitment goals. With student demand booming once again after the pandemic, it is an opportune moment. For over 30 years, QS has run student recruitment events and partnered with universities to get their product-offering better known. In recent years, these events and digital platform assets have been supplemented by the acquisition of a number of recruitment focussed services, making the QS of today an end-to-end solutions provider to universities.
Turner sees the student recruitment focus as a natural complement of QS's better-known focus on helping universities develop strong institutional performance.
The company has also started supporting key priorities for higher education, such as sustainability. November 2022 saw the launch of the inaugural Sustainability Ranking to provide a global perspective on universities’ impact in ESG. But, she continues, rankings are only one measure of excellence and ultimately a by-product of it. Drawing on her public policy and analytical background, she observes the way information is generated and its volume are creating unique challenges for its understanding.
"Right now, generative AI is changing the way that we are processing and producing information. That's a whole new set of challenges,” she says. “How do we ensure that where we access information… we [use] critical thinking and we understand the validity and are able to verify it? Organisations like QS can set standards and understand excellence, compare performance and really provide independent, authoritative benchmarks.”
Turner also sees an information asymmetry for students looking for the right education and opportunities that meet their own needs, as well as the needs of their families, communities and country. At a country level for example, students in the US considering domestic study options have a significant number of information resources available to them. Students in places like Korea or Vietnam who also wish to study in the US, however, don’t have the same luxury. The complexity grows as student characteristics are broken down individually.
Focussed rankings, such as Regional, Best Student City and Sustainability, provide a level of guidance for students, and the individual metrics and indicators held within each provide more nuance still. As students use these resources, however, they are in turn helping other students, Turner points out. Each year, over 60 million students engage with QS, providing their own data touchpoints to understand what the journey from prospective student to application, enrolment and success at university can look like.
Those 60 million students are supported through QS’ recruitment services, such as TopUniversities.com, student fairs, conversion and enrolment solutions, MoveIN admissions software and StudentApply. The company’s most recent acquisition, added to its portfolio at the tail end of 2021, StudentApply provides students from diverse markets with personalised counselling to narrow down their study choices. When analysised, those 60 million create broad profiles useful in determining how best to assist an individual.
“We have experience in how to support students from all over the world based on their needs and their preferences. We can support them the whole way through that journey so we can be a student recruitment partner for universities as well as a performance insight partner,” she says. “Students are often using their life savings for international education, so finding the right university and course is a crucial decision. We think that having better information is incredibly important to help people to make the right choice.”
Student data also serves institutions. The ongoing International Student Survey, which first began in 2003, attracts 100,000 responses from students around the world and helps to inform universities of trends in demand and behaviour. Topics and focusses change with industry needs. In 2020, QS was one of the first international education companies to start tracking student sentiments related to the COVID pandemic. Other focus areas include student perceptions of graduate employability skills , perceptions of destination countries, and, more recently, their sustainability focussed values.
“[We serve] universities to help them to shape their strategies and to be able to deliver on the promise to their students, to faculty, to partners,” Turner says. “Providing that service to the sector is really the basis of where QS has been operating for a long time.”
“There's a responsibility and need to be able to educate students from around the world.”
Running with purpose
During work trips to the group office, one of Turner’s managers organised pre-breakfast runs to debrief and prepare for the day ahead. Reflecting back on those days, she says they illustrated a valuable lesson. Aside from maintaining health, she learnt the importance of surrounding yourself with people you like working with and to enjoy what you do.
“It's really important to spend my working life doing something that has a real impact and doing it with colleagues who are equally committed,” she says. “We spend far too many hours of our life working for us to be using those on something that isn't meaningful and that isn't fulfilling. That's the number one thing, to make sure that QS is a place that is really inspiring and allows individuals to personally see the impact that they have.
“I think it's an important part of taking a more holistic approach and providing flexibility so our people can integrate working at QS into a really full life.”