When people think of diversity, they typically think about race and ethnicity. Although those are topics that are always fueled these days, people don’t tend to think about it in other ways. Some other types of diversity that come up at Blue Ridge Community College specifically are program choice, age, locality, gender, full-time v. part-time, and percentage taking a distance learning class.
Diversity by program choice can be broken down into occupational or technical, college transfer, or undecided. BRCC has a wide variety of occupational or technical choices, including nursing, automotive mechanic, airplane mechanic, and vet tech, to name a few.
At BRCC, age is split up into a range of numbers from under 18 to over 59. The majority of BRCC is made up of 18-21 year olds. Augusta is the highest in regards to locality, followed by Rockingham, Harrisonburg Staunton, and Waynesboro.
Students attending BRCC full-time v. part-time is pretty cut and dry. Almost 80% of students are part-time students, while a little over 20% are full-time. Over the last 10 years, BRCC has been a majority female school, dropping slightly to the males. As of 2011, BRCC is 57% female and 43% male.
One statistic that has sky rocketed over the last 10 years is distant learning classes. There is no surprise that this number has gone up with most homes having computers now, but it has almost tripled over the last 10 years, going from 25% to 63%.