Dear President Frank:

Thank you for providing AQIP with the current Systems Portfolio for Inver Hills Community College. Enclosed, you will find two paper copies of the complete Systems Appraisal Feedback Report, the first portion of which is an Executive Summary that may be useful for groups that do not need the full detail. The second section provides detail about the strengths and opportunities that were identified by the Appraisal team. Please take the time to examine both the strengths and opportunities, so that your institution can celebrate and build on its strengths and understand and explore its opportunities for improvement. The members of the Appraisal team, all knowledgeable about continuous quality improvement, devoted many hours to appraising your Systems Portfolio to ensure that their feedback would represent the consensus of the entire group and could serve as thoughtful, actionable guidance. To reap maximum benefit from it, you and your colleagues should also plan to invest substantial time in discussing and considering the team’s observations and advice, and in identifying the actions that will move your institution forward.

Your Systems Portfolio will undoubtedly serve as a model for other colleges and universities. We applaud the effort you put into its development up to this point, and expect you to continue to refine, expand and publish (on paper, or, even better, on your website) updates of your Portfolio. This will enable you to communicate effectively to both internal and external stakeholders what your institution is trying to do, what processes it is using to get there, how it is currently performing, and how it strives systematically to improve. Widely studied, the current version of your Systems Portfolio can be an important lever for institutional change. Please make the electronic link to it prominent on your institutional home page, and send the URL to Mary Green (mgreen@hlcommission.org) so that she can add the link to our AQIP website.

We are emailing your institution’s AQIP Liaison a copy of this letter and an electronic version of the Systems Appraisal Feedback Report. Please circulate these materials widely, and keep notes on the use you make of this feedback — with whom you share it, what discussions arise from it, actions you take as a result, etc. In the next 12 months at your next AQIP Strategy Forum you will be sharing this experience with other veteran AQIP institutions, all eager to learn how others are using their feedback effectively to shape strategies and drive additional improvement.

I know this Report will give additional fuel to Inver Hills Community College’s already strong commitment to quality. Both AQIP and the Higher Learning Commission continue to look forward to ongoing reports of progress and success. If you have not already scheduled one, we will soon contact you regarding your next Strategy Forum, at which we will ask you to focus on the results of this Appraisal and your other planning information to identify the major strategic issues that will drive the creation and pace of your institution’s future Action Projects. Unlike your first Strategy Forum, this next one will focus on helping you make your strategic priorities so clear that you can go back to campus confident that you can generate a steady stream of Action Projects that move your toward your goals.

Thank you again for all the hard work you have put into creating your Systems Portfolio. We hope that the Feedback report provides you with useful information that will help guide your quality movement forward.

Sincerely,

Stephen D. Spangehl

Director, Academic Quality Improvement Program