The Nashville State facilities include 239,000 square feet (22,200 m2) of space for classrooms, labs, offices, student services, and a library.

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.

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.

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.

The Southeast campus is home to the Randy Rayburn School of Culinary Arts, with its state-of-the-art kitchen and classrooms and a Hospitality program.

To increase accessibility to higher education for Tennesseans, Nashville State has constructed a campus in the northern quadrant of Davidson County.