What it means
SCC is Scottsdale Community College, and in conversation the three letters do all the work. “She’s taking classes at SCC.” “The SCC game is Saturday.” It is the Valley’s shorthand for the public two-year college at 9000 East Chaparral Road, where Chaparral meets Pima Road, east of the Loop 101 and just past the Scottsdale city line. The second thing locals call it is the Artichokes, after the mascot, and the two names cover the same ground: SCC is the institution, the Artichokes are its personality.
The full story of how Scottsdale lobbied for a college in the 1960s and ended up with one it does not govern is in the Scottsdale Community College guide. The short version is that the Maricopa County Community College District built it, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community owns the ground, and the City of Scottsdale supplied the name and the students.
Where you’ll meet it
On the Loop 101 exit signs for Chaparral Road, in the Talking Stick district next to the casino and Salt River Fields, in Scottsdale Unified’s dual-enrollment paperwork, and on local sports pages every fall, where “Artichokes” is the headline writer’s gift. New arrivals also meet it as a line in the school districts guide: the college is countywide, so Scottsdale’s council has no vote over it.
Where the word came from
The name is the plainest part. The Maricopa County Community College District, created by county voters in 1962, had opened Glendale and Mesa and was choosing its next campus when a Scottsdale committee under Paul Messinger spent two years shadowing the board to win it. The district named the college for the city, as it named all of them, and held its first classes in fall 1969 at Scottsdale High School. The permanent campus opened on August 20, 1970, in borrowed wooden barracks, two weeks before the Labor Day flood.
The address is the interesting part. On September 21, 1969 the district signed a 99-year lease for 160 acres from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Bureau of Indian Affairs. That made SCC the only public community college in the United States on tribal land, with the Community as landlord until 2069 and a constituency from the first year: tuition waivers for Native students in 1970, free classes for Community members from 1978, and an Indigenous Cultural Center in 2018. The Huhugam Ki Museum, a few minutes south, tells the longer history of the land.
The Artichoke was an accident of the era. In November 1972 the administration asked students to vote on a mascot. Students who thought the new college was spending on athletics while the library went short voted overwhelmingly for the Artichoke to embarrass the people who asked; drovers, avengers, zebras, bikers and sun risers also drew votes, according to Joan Fudala’s account in the Scottsdale Progress. The administration ordered a recount. The Artichoke won again. It took about two and a half years, until early 1975, to get the district board to accept it, and then the joke became the brand: Artie the Artichoke, the Fighting Artichokes, green and gold, and a regular on national lists of the best mascots in college sports.
What it is not
SCC is not Scottsdale’s college in any governing sense, and it is not in Scottsdale. It is a county institution on sovereign land that happens to carry the city’s name, which is why the city has no say in its budget or its president. It is also not “Scottsdale College” or “Scottsdale CC” in local speech; people say SCC or the Artichokes and nothing else.
The fine print
A few numbers anchor the word. The lease is 99 years from 1969, so the landlord question comes due in 2069. Enrollment runs around 9,500 students, roughly three-quarters of them part-time, which makes SCC a commuter college with no dorms and very full parking lots. The district has ten colleges, an elected seven-member board and a budget built on county property tax, state aid and tuition, so a Scottsdale homeowner pays for SCC on the county line of the tax bill rather than through the city.
The Artichoke record has one gap worth knowing. The exact day of the 1972 vote and the exact board meeting that accepted the mascot in 1975 are not in any source this site could open; Fudala’s “two and a half years” is the best available measure, and the college’s own history leans on the same telling.
The college president who shaped the place longest was Art DeCabooter, hired in February 1978 and in office until July 2008, who also chaired the Scottsdale Chamber, the Charros and the Rotary club. That overlap is how the city ran a college it did not govern. The current president, Eric Leshinskie, took over in 2022. For comparison with the Valley’s other campuses, see ASU, which is the university most SCC transfer students are aiming at, and the SUSD entry for the K-12 side of the alphabet soup.