In the way of background, colleges and universities have to be evaluated by outside reviewers to be accredited. In this part of the world, the Higher Learning Commission (HLC—universities are nearly as acronym happy as the military) does the evaluating.

The HLC is one of two Commission members of the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools (NCA). The HLC accredits institutions and in the process grants membership in the NCA’s 19-state mid-continent region, which includes Kansas and Missouri.

Without HLC approval, the degree that a degree-granting institution grants would be worth little more career-wise than the gold star your third grade teacher stuck on your times tables homework.

Historically, institutions have submitted to an HLC accreditation review every ten years, and most still do. This remains an accreditation option. As the ten-year process works, faculty and administration go through a laborious self-study every decade and assemble a voluminous report on what they have learned about themselves.

A team of HLC reviewers then descends on the campus, reviews the self-study report, meets with the faculty and staff, and produces any number of recommendations for future improvement. The administration then bids the reviewers adieu, breathes a sigh of relief, and either address the recommendations or sticks the review on the shelf, depending on the campus cynicism level.

As valuable as this accreditation process might be, the accrediting organizations began to see that the whole exercise could have more ongoing value for an institution if it were linked into a continuous quality improvement program or CQI.

Businesses have been applying CQI for decades. In a nutshell, CQI is a rival management philosophy to the more traditional, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” CQI proponents argue that most variables within an organization can and should be improved continuously.

To the degree that it makes sense, CQI applies the scientific method to the full range of routine processes with-in an organization in the expectation that the resulting improvements will make for more marketable services and products.

The CQI process was memorialized with the establishment of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. The Baldrige Award—named after a Reagan commerce secretary killed in a rodeo accident—was initiated by an act of Congress in 1987 in response to widespread concern about the perceived decline in quality of American products.

The Pew Charitable Trusts saw the wisdom of the CQI approach as applied to higher education and stepped up with a generous grant to help launch the Academic Quality Improvement Program or AQIP.

“With AQIP,” one learns on the AQIP home page,

“an institution demonstrates it meets accreditation standards and expectations through sequences of events that align with those ongoing activities that characterize organizations striving to improve their performance.”

In English, this means that an institution must show that it is actively pursuing continuous improvement if it is to maintain AQIP accreditation. If there is a downside to AQIP, it is the relentless bureaucratese of its administrators, both in language and in application.

Typically, an AQIP institution can choose the areas of improvement on which it believes work is needed. These can vary from institutional effectiveness to student performance to campus communication to infrastructure enhancement to diversity and inclusion.

Like the Baldrige program, AQIP does not dictate quality standards in the traditional sense: the mandating of some sort of minimum legally prescribed requirements. Rather, AQIP helps identify and communicate a variety of improvement strategies that can be used by institutions to achieve and sustain performance excellence over time.

The institution that takes this program seriously, and most do or they would not assume the responsibility, see it as a way to kill two relevant birds with one stone: accreditation and genuine improvement. The process also helps them align planning and budgeting.

The mechanics of the AQIP process are reasonably straightforward. They break out into a fixed set of activities.

Strategy Forum

This is the name for the AQIP-sponsored workshop that, in theory at least, provides the kind of peer review that will stimulate a given institution to choose its “Action Projects” wisely. The strategy forum typically follows some extensive intra-campus retreats and brainstorming sessions.

Action Projects

These projects, usually three or four, create the basic structure for quality improvement. At least one of these action projects must have something to do with making students smarter. Many institutions choose diversity as a goal, which has the unintended consequence of making competition for minority faculty and staff even more intense.

Action Project Progress Reports

Each September an AQIP institution must submit a report to the HLC. The reports include progress made to date, problems encountered en route, and successes and discoveries made along the way.

Systems Portfolio

This document presents an overview to explain the systems used to meet AQIP timelines and goals. AQIP institutions have to put such a portfolio together every four years and answer for it to the Higher Learning Council.

Systems Appraisal

A team of trained AQIP reviewers reads the institution’s AQIP Systems Portfolio and produces an “Appraisal Feedback Report” that evaluates the institution’s progress or lack thereof.

Quality Check-up

A team of two or three trained evaluators conduct a visit to verify the reliability of the institution’s Systems Portfolio, review Action Projects underway, assure commitment to the program, and confirm compliance with accreditation expectations.

AQIP lists seven participating institutions in Missouri and seventeen in Kansas. In the greater Kansas City area there are only three such institutions, Johnson County Community College, Missouri Western University in St. Joseph and the University of Saint Mary in Leavenworth.

In this month’s Higher Education Industry Outlook, University of Saint Mary president, Sr. Diane Steele, spoke glowingly of the AQIP process.

 “We are AQIP,” said Steele. “You have to report, and you have to make progress. So we have found it to be a very good move for us.”

Steele argued that AQIP empowers people at different levels to assert themselves in the university planning process, whether it be customer ser-vice, internal respect issues, benefits issues, or student performance. “It gives us that transparency. It also gives us a tool to move faster.”

In sum, said Steele, “It has changed our culture.” 

Time will tell whether AQIP changes the culture of higher education in general.