🇺🇸 Aiden Wilkins

The youngest student Ursinus has ever had

In late August 2025 a boy who was still eight sat down in an entry-level neuroscience course at Ursinus College in Collegeville, Pennsylvania. The college, founded in 1869, had never had a younger student. Aiden Wilkins’s worries beforehand were practical ones, and he listed them to The Philadelphia Inquirer: “What if I’m too short for the seat? What if I’m getting looked at? What if people are saying, ‘What are you doing here?’”

On the day the Inquirer sat in, the class of about a dozen students followed a lecture by building models of neurons out of pipe cleaners and beads, then stood at the front of the room and linked them into a system. Aiden’s desk mate, 18-year-old freshman Adrienne Dyer, summed him up in one line: “He’s so smart, it’s almost upsetting.” When he and his mother went to collect his student ID, the paper added, the staff thought they were being pranked.

Early signs: reading, algebra and the brain

His mother, Veronica Wilkins, says he could read at one; Aiden puts it at “like two.” The family agrees on the rest. As a toddler, his mother says, he wrote out an algebraic equation — “2x plus 10 equals 12” — and as a small child he liked to ask people their age so he could tell them, instantly, the year they were born.

The subject that would define him arrived at three. “Ever since I was 3, I’d watch an anatomy video and was always fascinated when I saw the brain,” he told NBC10. His mother, for her part, had to explain something that did not come naturally to him: that “the average person has to pull out a pen and paper and figure things out.”

Third grade to tenth in two and a half years

After preschool he studied online with Pearson Online Academy from kindergarten through second grade. The turning point came when his mother heard about David Balogun, a Pennsylvania boy who had graduated from high school at nine through Reach Cyber Charter School, an online public charter school. She called Balogun’s mother for advice. In March 2023 Aiden enrolled at Reach as a third grader and tested into its gifted program.

Then he moved quickly. Completing the full coursework for each grade, he went from third grade in March 2023 to tenth grade two and a half years later, working about eight hours a day. In spring 2025 he made the distinguished honor roll and played Puck from A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a high-school Shakespeare competition at DeSales University. The school’s principal, Cody Smith, put the pace in the understated terms educators prefer: “It’s not super common.”

How an eight-year-old gets into college

The push came from Aiden. He wanted in-person classes so he would be ready for college, and his mother researched dual enrollment, the arrangement that lets high-school students take college courses. She chose Ursinus for its courses and because it was close to home.

In March 2025 he visited the campus in a suit and tie. Associate provost Kelly Sorensen later recalled a boy “curious and eager to talk about glial cells and neuroplasticity — and even Shakespeare.” Sorensen’s conclusion was simple: “Let’s see if we can feed this very hungry young mind.” An Ursinus scholarship reduced the family’s cost for the course to $500. That fall he was one of four dual-enrollment students at the college, on campus three days a week alongside classmates aged 18 to 20.

His professor, Carlita Favero, sounded more delighted than daunted. “He’s a delight to talk to,” she told the Inquirer. “I’m excited to see how it all unfolds.”

A plan with a timetable

Aiden wants to be a pediatric neurosurgeon, “mainly because I like helping kids around my age,” he told NBC10. He has named Johns Hopkins and Princeton as his top college choices, with medical school to follow. The family has deliberately slowed the high-school clock: rather than race ahead, he is taking a full year each for 10th, 11th and 12th grade, which would mean graduating at about eleven.

Outside class he calls himself “a social butterfly.” He plays basketball and soccer, rides his bike and plays video games, and he recently started Fresh Start to Success, a nonprofit that raises money for school supplies and other support for children in foster care.

Going viral — and what the headlines got wrong

The Inquirer broke the story on August 30, 2025. Within three weeks it had been picked up by NBC10, 6abc, People, NBC Nightly News and stations across the country; he was later featured by BET and on The Jennifer Hudson Show. Ursinus says the coverage reached more than a billion unique views — the college’s own figure. “I never thought I would get so much attention,” Aiden said. “I thought maybe a few people would notice me, but I’m international!”

Some headlines ran ahead of the facts. He is not “the youngest neuroscience college student ever,” as Black Enterprise put it; he is the youngest person ever to take a class at Ursinus. He took one introductory course, not a degree program. And he is far from the youngest American in a college classroom: Michael Kearney started college at six and earned a bachelor’s degree at ten, in 1994.

Where is Aiden Wilkins now?

The latest verifiable update is Ursinus Magazine’s feature of November 25, 2025, which described Aiden, then nine, as a dual-enrolled student who had begun a neuroscience class at Ursinus that fall; September 2025 reports placed him in tenth grade at Reach. No later report has described further college courses, grades or awards. Born in 2016, he turned ten in September 2026. If the family’s one-grade-per-year plan has held, he is now in 11th grade — an inference, not a reported fact.