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Community college leaders often look to institutional researchers to provide information to better inform their decision-making process, which guides local policy making and practice. The purpose of this paper is to acquaint community college institutional researchers with a data visualization technique called classification and regression tree (CART) analysis and demonstrate how it may be used to communicate student degree completion findings to internal and external audiences. The CART analysis provides a data-driven pictorial representation of how successful community college students are at earning an associate degree based on demographic, financial and academic variables. Using a statewide dataset, this study found grade point average, being an underrepresented minority, KEES, earned credit ratio, age, enrollment intensity, Federal Pell Grant, and gender were statistically significant variables of associate degree completion. Implications of these findings and the application of this technique are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Completing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) is the first and most important step for students to receive their portion of the billions of grant aid dollars disbursed in federal student financial aid; however, every year many low income and community college students fail to complete the FAFSA. Over the past twenty years, surveys have shown four main reasons students do not complete the FAFSA: the complexity of the FAFSA, loan debt, "other," and no financial need. This article reviews current efforts, policies and practices aimed at increasing FAFSA completion rates at the national, state, and local levels. It also shows that many of these efforts are not assessed or evaluated for effectiveness. Special attention on FAFSA completion practices are made for financial aid administrators at a community and local level that focus on personal one-to-one assistance, which research has found to be the most effective means of increasing FAFSA completion rates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]