State Policy Climates for College Student Success: An Analysis of State Policy Documents Pertaining to College Persistence and Completion

This article reports the findings of an exploratory analysis of state policy climates for college student persistence and completion. We performed an analysis of more than 100 documents collected from 8 states chosen largely on the basis of their performance on past Measuring Up reports. Our analysis of governors' state-of-the-state addresses, state Master Plans, and performance-funding programs produced several notable findings. Although we had assumed that states that perform better in retaining and graduating their college students would likely have state policy climates that espouse greater support for college student success, our analysis provided some evidence that it is the lower-performing states, in fact, whose policy climates espouse more support for these goals. We also found evidence of rising political support across all states for increased college persistence and completion, although the rate of growth of support has risen fastest over the past 8 years in low-performing states. We examine some of the implications of these findings, and present several directions that future research might take in studying state policy climates for college student success.