As an undergraduate at Harvard College, Bidelman received an Honorary Harvard College Scholarship for academic excellence in 1939. He graduated in 1940. Bidelman entered the graduate program at the University of Chicago affiliated with Yerkes Observatory. His doctoral advisor was William W.Morgan, who discovered the first definite evidence that the Milky Way Galaxy is a spiral galaxy, and, with Philip Keenan, the Morgan-Keener (MK) system of stellar classification. As a graduate student, Bidelman assisted Morgan and Keenan by taking some of the spectrograms for their book, An Atlas of Stellar Spectra.
For his 1943 dissertation, Bidelman reported the Double Cluster in the I Persei association is physically associated with neighborhood supergiant stars, and is part of an association of O- and B-type stars, and designated 47 stars as its members. Bidelman received his Ph.D. in 1943. The Yerkes astronomy graduate program directed by Otto Struve began issuing degrees in 1940, and he was among their first ten graduates.