Did You Know? Little Know Facts About Bloomfield College

Editor's note: Bloomfield College Beat is a weekly feature written by BC students focusing on life on campus. This week's column is written by Andrew Orphanidis.

Bloomfield College, as we all know, is a small private school, but tell me something I don’t know. Here are some useless facts about BC you may not care about but frankly, you may of never known:

For starters, according to Forbes Magazine, BC ranks No. 554 among colleges in the United States, realizing there are over 5,000 different colleges and universities, this isn’t such a bad ranking for an up and coming school.

BC, also, has a student population of just over 2,000 with the faculty to student ratio hovering around 14:1. This sounds great academically but probably doesn’t bode well for our sports team - at least you would think - but with a huge however, it has not deterred from Bloomfield College’s athletic teams at all.

BC, surprisingly, and very inspiringly, is a Division II school (minus football, and there should be football here, it would only add to the school but that is another story all in itself). To put things in perspective, Montclair State University, which is a Division II school and the third-largest school in New Jersey, houses more then 20,000 students per year, which is 10 times more then BC. Usually, when the NCAA assigns schools to a certain division, it is based on the number of students and competition comes second. Throw the numbers out the window and repeat after me - TALENT!

Let’s begin the cliches: Less is more, don’t judge a book by its cover, David versus Goliath (which may be more of a fictional story than a cliche) and so on. This is something to be very proud of and to further prove my point, for the fourth time since 2003, the Bloomfield College men’s basketball team is champions of the Central Atlantic Collegiate Conference. Congratulations to them and to BC in general.

One last fact that you may of not heard of that is of great importance to BC is the grant we have been awarded by Walmart and The Institute for Higher Education Policy (IHEP). The grant, the Walmart Minority Student Success Award, is worth $100,000 and is intended to help build on BC’s demonstrated successes in enrolling, retaining and graduating first-generation college students. The grant was made possible by a $4.2 million grant to IHEP from the Walmart foundation.

There are many exciting things happening here at Bloomfield College and we are all more proud than ever to be a Bloomfield Deacon.