Nashville State Community College - History

History

It has its origins in a planned redevelopment of a campus on White Bridge Road which was formerly the site of Thayer Hospital, a hospital operated by what is now the United States Department of Veterans Affairs. When the hospital was relocated adjacent to Vanderbilt University and its Medical Center in the 1960s, part of its former campus became the home of Nashville State Technical Institute.

NSTI or Nashville Tech, as it was generally known, was formed to supply the training needed for positions requiring only the Associate's degree or professional certificates, but also to provide the beginning years of a more advanced technical education. At first, liberal arts offerings were essentially the minimum required for the institution to meet these goals, but the plan was always for NSTI to become a full community college. Nashville State opened in 1970 with an enrollment of 398 students.

As time went by, and liberal arts offerings increased somewhat, the school was used more and more by students who were looking to complete the first two years of a four-year degree at a more affordable cost. Some of these students found that credits earned at NSTI were hard to transfer to other accredited schools outside of the Tennessee Board of Regents system. A revamping of the curriculum was put in place to address this concern, and concurrently the institution was renamed Nashville State Community College, a pattern which had already been established at the other, similar urban technical institutes in the state.

Unlike other community colleges operated by the Tennessee Board of Regents, Nashville State does not conduct any intercollegiate athletics programs. Under the terms of a judicial consent decree, Nashville State must carefully tailor its offerings so as not to be in direct competition for students with Tennessee State University, a historically black university also located in Nashville, which has been ordered by federal court to achieve a higher degree of racial integration.