| Southwest Tennessee Community College | |
| Established: | Consolidation completed July 1, 2000 |
| Type: | Public community college |
| Parent: | Tennessee Board of Regents |
| President: | Tracy D. Hall |
| Students: | 6,391 (spring 2022)[1] |
| Faculty: | 189 full-time and 221 part-time (spring 2022)[2] |
| City: | Memphis |
| State: | Tennessee |
| Country: | U.S. |
| Campus: | Urban |
| Sports Nickname: | Saluqis |
Southwest Tennessee Community College is a public community college in Memphis, Tennessee. As the product of a merger between two colleges in 2000, the school has two campuses in Memphis and several satellite centers. It is operated by the Tennessee Board of Regents.
The college resulted from the 2000 merger between two institutions, the former Shelby State Community College and the former State Technical Institute at Memphis ("STIM"). Nathan Essex, the school's founding president, announced in 2014 that he would retire the next summer.[3]
The merger was an attempt to reduce the overhead of maintaining two separate institutional managements and a recognition of the increasing convergence of academic and technical education. It also has made credits earned at the former Technical Institute more readily transferable to other institutions of higher learning, which was an additional goal of the merger. Southwest is one of the largest two-year colleges operated by the Tennessee Board of Regents.
Southwest Tennessee Community College is a comprehensive, multicultural, public, open-access college. Southwest is accredited by the Commission on Colleges of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools.
Southwest has several campuses and centers. These include:
The college maintains collegiate sports teams in the following sports:
The mascot is the Saluqi.
Both basketball teams have a winning tradition and regularly advance to the national tournaments. Basketball games are played at the Verties Sails Gymnasium on the Union Avenue Campus.
The Saluqi's baseball program plays at USA Stadium in Millington, Tennessee.