Even though he had no high school diploma, the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah accepted him as a student in the fall of 1933. "There I was a 27 years old college freshman who hadn't been to school in years," Bascom recalled. "I felt like a wild horse in a pen." But as a BYU student, he was persistence, taking every art course the college offered. He studied painting and drawing under professors E.H. Eastmond and B.F. Larsen, and sculpture under Torleif S. Knaphus.