Policy collection from institutions of higher education: a brief report on challenges and strategies

Government entities and health regulators have long used policies to shape public health. Policy surveillance, the process of tracking policies over time, is crucial in evaluating these efforts and can be applied in settings where health and safety regulations are established. Policy text collection, an essential early phase of policy surveillance, is typically feasible for state and federal policies through legislative databases. However, such access to policy text is not as widely available for policies by other organizations-such as schools or workplaces. The primary aim of this case study is to inform the use of policy surveillance in settings outside of federal and state laws by (1) examining the feasibility of policy text collection beyond these settings using a case study of higher education policies, (2) describing the challenges and limitations in collecting text from higher education policies, and (3) providing recommendations for collecting text of organizational policies.