We compute the J/ψ polarization observables λ θ , λ φ , λ θφ in a Color Glass Condensate (CGC) + nonrelativistic QCQ (NRQCD) formalism that includes contributions from both color singlet and color octet intermediate states. Our results are compared to low p T data on J/ψ polarization from the LHCb and ALICE experiments on protonproton collisions at center-of-mass energies of √ s = 7 TeV and 8 TeV. Our CGC+NRQCD computation provides a better description of data for p T ≤ 15 GeV relative to extant nextto-leading (NLO) calculations within the collinear factorization framework. These results suggest that higher order computations in the CGC+NRQCD framework have the potential to greatly improve the accuracy of extracted values of the NRQCD universal long distance matrix elements.