15-year-old will be the youngest student to graduate from UNLV
LAS VEGAS (KTNV) – At the tender age of 15, Jack Rico is about to become the youngest graduate from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
When the teen’s not deep in his history books studying for finals, you can find him on UNLV’s campus writing a 25-page research paper.
His peers just look at him as another student but are surprised when they find out his age.
“Every now and then, I’ll get like a shocking reaction from someone, but most of my classmates are really accepting of me. They don’t treat me as a kid; they treat me as an equal,” Rico said.
After Rico failed third grade when a new learning system was introduced, he told his mom that there had to be another way.
It was at that point they decided Rico would be home-schooled. After three years, his mother realized how intelligent her son really is.
“At 11, he was smarter than me,” his mother Ru Andrade said. “I knew that I had given him probably everything I had and that he probably needed better teachers.”
They found a program at Fullerton College in California.
Rico took an entrance exam, passed with flying colors and was enrolled the next day.
Two years later, he graduated in the midst of the pandemic with four associate degrees in history, social sciences, arts and human expression, and social behavior.
He maintained a 4.0 GPA the whole time, which got him a full-ride scholarship at UNLV, where he will get his bachelor’s degree in history.
“It was kind of unbelievable. At that point when my mom told me, I was like, ‘You’re joking. This is a funny joke,’ but no, this was actually happening. And when we first came here, I automatically fell in love with the campus and the people here,” Rico said.
The 15-year-old will graduate from UNLV on Dec. 14, becoming the youngest student to walk the university’s stage in the school’s 64-year history.
But Rico says his learning journey is far from being over.
“I want to get my master’s, but I don’t know what I want to get it in,” he said. “I don’t plan on getting it in history, so I want to audit some courses. I kind of want to discover some of my other interests and stuff and see what I want to do with my master’s.”
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