Fun Facts

• BCC started its first quarter with 464 students and by the end of its 40 th year was serving about 19,000 students per quarter. That’s a compound annual growth rate of nearly 10 percent!
• In total, BCC has served a remarkable 500,000 students in all programs in its first 40 years.
• In 1970 BCC student Gary Jones filled in as switchboard operator, surprising callers who were expecting a female voice. Many of them hung up thinking they had dialed the wrong number.
• Hollywood movie actor Jim Caviezel (“The Passion of the Christ,” “The Count of Monte Cristo,” “The Final Cut”) attended BCC in the late 1980s.
• BCC is the third largest institution of higher learning in Washington State, behind the University of Washington and Washington State University.
• To cope with soaring enrollments, BCC more than doubled the square footage of its facilities between 1993 and 2004.
• Rolling Stone magazine in 1998 named BCC one of ten top community colleges in the nation.
• BCC’s North Campus building was once the headquarters for a fledgling Microsoft Corporation.
• Famed Hollywood movie director Stanley Kramer taught film courses at BCC in the early 1980s.