Most public policy related to college readiness occurs at the state level, but as with any state-level policy, significant variation exists across the 50 states. To make sense of this variation and advance our empirical knowledge surrounding state college readiness policy, we pose two questions in this study: How do states group together based on their commonalities (or lack thereof) across several college readiness policies? What underlying themes emerge across college readiness policies in the context of variation across states? We find that states cluster around three distinct types of college readiness policy. We also find a significant number of states are best described not by a single college readiness policy but rather by the states’ overall low college readiness policy effort. We review how these findings align with extant research on state-level college readiness policy and discuss possible factors that may drive the variation we observe across states.